An individual has rights to the intellectual or creative property they create. As an author, you own the rights to your work from the moment that work takes on some fixed form, until or unless the rights are transferred to another entity. Traditional publishing contracts often assign copyright to the publisher, thus limiting how and where the work can be used and distributed in the future. If this happens, authors may be restricted from incorporating this work into their teaching and research, posting it to a website, or in an Institutional repository or digital collection.
The purpose of this page is to provide information about author's rights and to provide additional resources for further information.
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is a great source of information on author's rights, including this AUTHOR'S ADDENDUM . This addendum is a legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement and allows authors to keep key rights.
Creative Commons allows authors to customize how they want to disseminate their work to the world.
Worried you gave up your rights?
Check out the The Authors Alliance/Creative Commons Termination of Transfer Tool. This tool walks you through a series of questions that will help you determine if you can get your rights back.
Some Open Access publishers have questionable reputations and credentials and often charge authors to publish with their journals. A list of questionable journals can be found here. Please research the reputation of any journal carefully before submitting your article.
Here's a brief explanation of how your rights as an author may be impacted by publication