Author Rights
As soon as one begins researching and writing a scholarly work in a given medium, it is covered under copyright law and no other actions are necessary for it to be protected. But, when authors agree to have that work published, the journal editors may ask to transfer your copyright. A great many publishers require that authors sign away the rights to their work, although not always. Authors can retain the rights to their work in several ways: negotiating the author's addendum to the traditional scholarly publishing contract, publishing under a Creative Commons license, and other open alternatives.
Creative Commons
Copyright law was developed long before the emergence of the Internet, and can make it hard to legally perform actions we take for granted on the network: copy, paste, edit source, and post to the web. The default setting of copyright law is that all of these actions require explicit permission, granted in advance.
The Creative Commons (CC) licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. Creative Commons tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to explicitly grant permission to certain uses of their copyrighted works. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law.
CC licenses are customizable. Some examples include: CC-BY, which only requires that content be attributed when reused; CC-BY-ND, which requires attribution, but does not allow derivatives of your work to be produced; CC-BY-NC, which requires attribution, but does not allow for any commercial uses of your work. Choosing the right CC license for your research and scholarly output is easy and can be done in just a few very simple steps at the Creative Commons website.
Open Alternatives
One alternative to signing away the rights to your research and writing is to publish your work openly. There are many ways of doing this, including in peer-reviewed open access journals. The reality, however, is that the tenure and promotion process, coupled with the entrenched practices of scholarly publishing, does not encourage and makes it very difficult for many scholars across the disciplines (though there are exceptions) to publish openly. For more information on open access publishing, please visit the Open Access section of this guide.
Resources
Below, the Center presents some recommended resources on author's rights. For more information, please contact us at cscdc@northwestern.edu or visit our website.
Committee on Institutional Cooperation
As CIC members, Northwestern University scholars have access to its scholarly communication resources, including the author copyright contract addendum.
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
SPARC is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system.
Creative Commons
CC develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.
SHERPA/RoMEO
An international database dedicated to providing publisher copyright and self-archiving policies.
Keep Your Copyrights
This resource aims to make clear why you might want to keep your copyrights, and includes important information on author contracts.
Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine
The engine will help you generate a PDF form that you can attach to a journal publisher's copyright agreement to ensure that you retain certain rights.