Monday, April 3, 2017
In the course of publishing academic works, publishers will often ask you to sign copyright transfer agreements; these agreements transfer the copyright of your work to the publisher, and can limit what you can do with your own work after publishing. Retaining certain rights makes it easier for you to share your work without restriction.
This is particularly important in light of the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications, requiring researchers to make grant-funded research Open Access within 12 months of publication. Learn more about it on the Library’s Open Access guide.
How can you protect your rights?
Examples of how you may want to share your work.
- Think about how you want to be able to use your work after you publish
- Use the publisher policy database SHERPA/RoMEO to understand the policies of the journals you are interested in publishing with
- Carefully read the copyright transfer agreement the publisher provides, they are legal documents
- Before signing an agreement, know that copyright transfer agreements are negotiable!
- Educate yourself: The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has created a simple addendum you can attach to your publishing agreement to help you retain rights to create new works with the article, share the article with colleagues for non-commercial purposes, make and distribute copies in the course of teaching and research, and post the Article on personal or institutional Web sites and in other open access digital repositories.
Get more information by:
- visiting the Library’s Author’s Rights guide
- contacting Waterloo’s Copyright & Licensing Librarian, Lauren Byl
- registering for an Open Access policy workshop - the next one is April 6
