Authors - Keep Your Copyright! - Copyright, Fair Use, & Author Rights - LibGuides at University of California San Diego

Your Scholarship, Your Rights

“Be a responsible steward of your intellectual property. Retain vital rights for you and your readers while authorizing publishing activities that benefit everyone by making scholarship more widely available.”

— Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)

What can authors do? Librarians are happy to help with the process!

Negotiate with the publishers to retain explicit ownership of your content (Author's 5 Basic Rights)
Transfer, via an author addendum, to the publisher only those rights needed for publication.
Specify other rights of particular value to you or your home institution
Consider publishing with an organization that will facilitate the widest dissemination of your work in order to help you fulfill your personal and professional goals as a scholar.

Managing Author Rights: Negotiation and Reversion
UC Berkeley
Managing Copyright & Negotiating Publishing Agreements
UC Office of Scholarly Communication
Rights Templates Toolkit
UCLA
How to Retain Ownership of Your Copyright when Dealing with Publishers
ASU Library
Improving Your Book Contract
The Authors' Guild
The Rights Retention Strategy and publisher equivocation: an open letter to researchers
2021 April 20
FAQ: COPYRIGHT OWNERSHIP & ONLINE COURSE MATERIALS
Authors' Alliance
Primer on Rights Retention
by Stephen J. Eglen (April 7, 2021)
Publishing Without Exclusive Rights by Peter Suber
Journal publishers don’t need exclusive rights. Or, they don’t need them for publishing.

Know Your Rights

Copyright holders retain 5 basic rights:

Right to Reproduce
Right to Prepare Derivative Works
Right to Distribute
Right to Display Publicly (related to artistic works)
Right to Perform Publicly (related to musical or dramatic works)

What Could You Lose if You Sign Away Your Rights?

The right to:

Use your work in a course pack
Place copies on print or electronic reserves
Mount a copy on your web site
Deposit a copy in your institutional repository
Distribute a copy to colleagues

Rights Reversion

Understanding Rights Reversion
Author's Alliance
Crafting a Reversion Letter
Author's Alliance
Get your Rights Back! Termination of Transfer
Author's Alliance and Creative Commons

Author Addenda to Copyright Agreements & Model Agreements

Model Agreement for Digital Scholarship
The Model Publishing Contract for Digital Scholarship has been prepared to facilitate the publication of open access books, including accommodating new types of long-form, multimodal digital scholarship.
Publication Contracts from the Authors Alliance
Publication contract resources incl. Understanding and Negotiating Book Publishing Contracts
SPARC Author Rights Resources
Your Work. Your Rights.
SPARC/ARL Authors Rights and Addendum
Author Addendum by Becker Library’s Scholarly Communications
From the Washington University School of Medicine
Sample publishing agreement language and model licenses
From the University of California Copyright Office.
More lessons on negotiating a contributors contract

Permission template letters

MIT permission to deposit work in an IR (2017)

Authors Alliance - Support and Resources for Authors

Authors Alliance

The [student] Fight for Fair Copyright

Your Creative Commons License

Creative Commons in the Classroom

About the licenses

Best Practices for CC Attribution
Attribution examples and best practices for other creators' CC licensed materials
CC Licenses explained
Wikipedia shares some examples and a great video on the subject.
Designating your Work CC
Here are some examples of how to mark your work with the CC license
Examples of good license embedding

FAQ

How can I make sure I get credit for my work?

Copyright, Fair Use, & Author Rights: Authors - Keep Your Copyright!