96 · Representative Documents: Author’s Rights
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
Author Rights
http://libguides.northwestern.edu/scholcomm/authorrights
Author Rights -Scholarly Communication -LibGuides at Northwestern University
http://libguides.northwestern.edu/scholcomm/authorrights[9/17/14 1:50:43 PM]
require that authors sign away the rights to their work, but this doesn't always have to be the case. 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.
Author Addendum
Your article has been accepted for publication in a journal and, like your colleagues, you want it to have the widest possible distribution and
impact in the scholarly community. In the past, this required print publication. Today, there are other options such as online archiving, but the
publication agreement you’ll likely encounter may actually prevent open distribution of your work. You would never intentionally keep your
research from a readership that could benefit from it, but signing a restrictive publication agreement can limit your scholarly universe and lessen
your impact as an author.
Why? According to many standard publication agreements, all rights—including copyright—go to the journal. Signing such an agreement may
prevent you from re-using or sharing your work. You might want to republish your article, or portions of it, in later works. You might want to
give copies to your class or distribute it to colleagues. And you likely want to post it on your professional web page or deposit it in an online
repository. These are all ways to give your research wide exposure and fulfill your goals as a scholar, but they may be prohibited or restricted
by an authors agreement. If you sign on the publisher’s dotted line, is there any way to retain these critical rights?
Yes. The CIC encourages its scholarly authors to consider attaching an authors addendum to retain certain rights for the author and the
University. The addendum states that, regardless of what terms agreed to in the publishing contract or agreement, the Author retains for herself
and her university a non-exclusive right to continue to use the work, to modify it, to share it online. Other organizations have also developed
authors addenda: the SPARC Author Addendum is a legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement and allows you to keep key rights to
your articles. The Author Addendum is a free resource developed by SPARC in partnership with Creative Commons and Science Commons,
established non-profit organizations that offer a range of copyright options for many different creative endeavors.
Creative Commons
The ideal of universal access to research, education, and culture is made possible by the Internet, but our legal and social systems sometimes
operate in conflict with the goals of broad public access. 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, whether the user is an artist, teacher, scientist, librarian,
policymaker, or a member of the general public.
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.
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