Journals
Many traditional academic journal publishers require a transfer copyright 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. You can find examples of copyright transfer agreements in the box below.
You can negotiate with publishers to retain some of these rights. One of the easiest and most common ways to do this is through an addendum to your publishing contract. An addendum enables you to retain your rights when publishing.
Visit Copley's Scholarly Communications Guide or Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Author Addendum page to learn more about your rights as an author.
This guide details how to retain ownership of your copyright when dealing with publishers.
Walks you through different scenarios of negotiating with publishers and includes sample addendums
Books
Understanding Rights Reversion: When, Why, & How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available
This guide for authors outlines how to regain the rights to a book you have published in order to increase access to it.
© 2015 Authors Alliance, CC BY 4.0
Nicole Cabrera, Jordyn Ostroff, Brianna Schofield: Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
If you've retained some of your rights as an author, such as the right to deposit your work in an online archive, contact the library to have your work included in Digital USD, USD's institutional repository. Your work will be openly accessible worldwide, and you will receive regular analytic reports on who is viewing and downloading your scholarship.