As an author, when you create something, you hold the copyright to it. It's important to think about protecting and retaining your copyright, so that you can continue to use your own work going forward.
Authors Alliance is an excellent platform to start learning about Author Rights and related topics, including Understanding and Negotiating Book Publishing Contracts, Rights Reversion, and Termination of Transfer.
Many traditional academic journal publishers require a copyright transfer agreement to publish articles in their journals. Signing one of these agreements typically means ceding your copyright to the publisher. You may lose the right to post your published article on your website, distribute it to students in your classes, include it in an anthology, or create new works based on it. This is an example of a copyright transfer agreement, or CTA.
You can try to negotiate with publishers to retain some of these rights. One of the most common ways to do this is through an addendum to your publishing contract. An addendum is a "legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement and allows you to keep key rights to your articles," and you can see more information about how to use an addedum by visiting the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition's (SPARC) Author Addendum page. Other useful resources are Arizona State University's Guide to Negotiation and Negotiating Scenarios by McGill University.
If you have already transfered your copyright to another entity, but wish to get it back, you can try to do so with guidance from the Termination of Transfer Tool created by Authors Alliance and Creative Commons.
When you hold the copyright to a work, you get to specify how others can interact with the work going forward. You can signal to others how they may re-use the work by applying a Creative Commons license. There are six licenses to choose from, and they range in terms of how a work may be modified or reused, whether it can be reused in a commercial application, and how adaptions must be re-licensed.
Here are two examples:
To help choose a license that best fits your needs, use the Creative Commons License Chooser tool.
If you've retained some of your rights as an author, such as the right to deposit your work in an digital repository, contact digital@sandiego.edu to have your work included in Digital USD, USD's open access institutional repository. In the case of published scholarly articles, authors will need to pay close attention to the version that their journal publisher allows them to deposit. In many cases, the final published version cannot be deposited, but the accepted manuscript -- which is the author’s submitted version, post-peer review, but without publisher’s formatting/layout -- can be.
For more information about article versions, see this explanation.
Depositing your work in Digital USD will expand your reach and impact as an author. Your work will be openly accessible worldwide, discoverable via online search engines, permanently preserved, and tracked by usage such as download counts.