Open Access Publishing

Publishing agreements can be confusing especially when dealing with open access publishing models and funding requirements for public access. Being proactive in the submission process by checking the for authors section of a journal's website can be helpful in understanding what rights you retain - and which you sign over to the publisher. If your research is grant funded, you should let publishers know up-front during the submission process that the article you are submitting will be subject to public access policies if accepted for publication. For more information on retaining your rights and templates for letters you can submit alongside an article submission, see the Rights Retention Strategy by PlanS from the European Science Foundation.

Briefly, authors are entitled to negotiate certain rights with a publisher. These may include:

• The right to adopt a rights retention strategy (the right to distribute the Author Accepted Manuscript without embargo)
• The right to deposit an Open Access copy of the work in an institutional repository (with or without an embargo period)
• Exemptions for teaching and educational purposes
• The right to reuse figures, images, and tables from the work in future publications.

If you could use a second set of eyes on a publishing agreement, please reach out to your subject librarian. We cannot provide legal advice, but we can help you understand what rights you will retain.

Addendums to Publishing Contracts

Many journals have not yet updated their policies to allow for archiving of grant funded research articles that are subject to public access guidelines such as those from NIH and NSF. Both agencies encourage authors to be proactive in the submission process to make it clear that the article they are submitting is subject to public access policies.

Author addenda are established legal instruments used to modify a publisher's Copyright Transfer Agreements (CTAs) to protect an author's rights in their work. They have been in use since the mid-2000s when open access publishing really picked up.  Addenda are easy to use, they are familiar to publishers, and do not require legal expertise on the author's part. These addenda can help insure that you are compliant with funding requirements by making the author accepted manuscript available for immediate access on the funder's preferred archive.

The addenda options below both:

• keep non-exclusive rights for the author (some limited to scholarly uses, some limited to noncommercial uses)
• give authors the right to use the published version of the manuscript
• acknowledge the potential for existence of prior non-exclusive licenses, either for funder policies, institutional policies, or both

Creative Common's Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine (just follow the directions on the screen)

SPARC Author Addendum to Publication Agreement 

Publishing a book? See the Author's Alliance information about negotiating contracts.