Retain your rights

Why?

Typically, publishing your work requires the transfer of all your rights in the work in exchange for commercial publication. A university press or publishing house will require that you do this through a "copyright transfer agreement" or "publisher's agreement."

It is important that you examine your agreement to ensure that you retain the following rights:

  • Posting work on your website, a disciplinary/institutional repository.
  • Use excerpts, etc. in future works.
  • Make copies of the work for teaching purposes.
  • Give permission for the work to be used in a course at UVic.
  • Grant permission for the work to be used at other universities.

How do you retain your rights?

  • Canadian Association of University Teachers - Intellectual Property Advisory (CAUT)

  • It is critical that you, as an author, read the publication agreement carefully. It is important that journal publishers only receive the rights necessary to publish your work.

  • Consider using an author addendum to amend the publication agreement so as to retain key rights to the article that is published.

  • Author addendum (CARL/SPARC)

  • An author addendum is a legal tool you can use to modify the publisher's agreement and keep rights to the journal articles you publish.

    The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) have created an author addendum that you can use to secure key rights to an article that is published.

Other author addendums / licenses

  • Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine (Science Commons)

  • An online tool created by Science Commons to simplify the process of choosing and implementing an addendum to retain scholarly rights. By selecting from among four addenda offered, any author can fill in a form to generate and print a completed amendment that can be attached to a publisher’s copyright assignment agreement to retain critical rights to reuse and offer their works online.

  • CIC - Statement on Publishing Agreements (Purdue U)

  • The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) is a consortium of 12 world-class American research universities, advancing their missions by sharing expertise, leveraging campus resources and collaborating on innovative programs.