7 Retaining your Copyright

As an author, you control the copyright for your thesis or dissertation. If you decide to submit your manuscript for publication in a journal or book, however, you will likely be asked to sign an author agreement specifying how the work will be copyrighted and/or licensed. Often, these agreements will ask you to transfer your copyright to the publisher in full, so that you no longer have the right to control the copying, distribution, display, transmission or re-use of your work. Other times, you may keep your copyright but be asked to grant an exclusive or non-exclusive license to the publisher. When publishers hold the copyright, it can create significant barriers for authors who want to reuse their work or allow others to use it. Negotiating changes to these standard agreements can help authors avoid unfortunate barriers to reuse and sharing. Here are some options to explore:

• One thing you can do is ask the publisher to draft an author agreement that allows you to retain your copyright while granting the publisher a non-exclusive license to publish your work. Here is an example of some commonly used language to suggest:

“The Author grants to [the Publisher] a royalty-free, non-exclusive right to publish and distribute the articles in all forms of media.”

• If the publisher insists on obtaining the copyright, you can attach an author addendum which allows you to retain certain rights to re-use your work.
• You can also check Open Policy Finder to learn more about your publisher’s copyright policy. Many academic publishers allow you to self-archive a copy of your work on a personal webpage, institutional repository (such as UI’s Iowa Research Online), or a disciplinary repository (such as PubMed Central), oftentimes after a 12 or 24-month embargo.

Here are some guides that can help with the negotiation process:

• SPARC has useful information and suggested text for author addenda
• Arizona State University has a guide negotiating your author rights
• Open Policy Finder allows you to search through the standard author agreement policies of many publications.

Some research funders request or require that work created with their funds be made available openly on the web (example: the NIH requires grant receivers to deposit articles into PubMed Central, see the UI Libraries LibGuide on the NIH Public Access Policy for details). Funder policies can be reviewed in the Open Policy Finder web site.

Making research and scholarship as widely available as possible supports the University of Iowa’s mission to advance “scholarly and creative endeavor through leading-edge research and artistic production.”