Copyright Information

Faculty As Rights Holders

When you publish, you may be signing away your rights to use your own work.

Copyright transfer agreements often require you to transfer all of your copyrights exclusively to the publisher, thereby losing control of any subsequent public distribution of your work.
Restrictions on use of your own work may prohibit personal distribution for teaching and research, as well as posting your paper on publicly available Web sites and archives.

Know Your Rights as the Author

The author is the copyright holder
As the author of a work you are the copyright holder unless and until you transfer the copyright to someone else in a signed agreement.
Assigning your rights matters
Normally, the copyright holder possesses the exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, public performance, public display, and modification of the original work. An author who has transferred copyright without retaining these rights must ask permission unless the use is one of the statutory exemptions in copyright law.
The copyright holder controls the work
Decisions concerning use of the work, such as distribution, access, pricing, updates, and any use restrictions belong to the copyright holder. Authors who have transferred their copyright without retaining any rights may not be able to place the work on course Web sites, copy it for students or colleagues, deposit the work in a public online archive, or reuse portions in a subsequent work. That’s why it is important to retain the rights you need.
Transferring copyright doesn’t have to be all or nothing
The law allows you to transfer copyright while holding back rights for yourself and others. This is the compromise that the SPARC Author Addendum helps you to achieve.

The system is changing — you can make a difference.

Carefully examine the pricing, copyright, and subscription licensing agreements of any journal you contribute to as an author, reviewer, or editor.
Where possible, publish in open-access journals with funding models that do not charge readers or their institutions for access. Serve on editorial boards or review manuscripts for open-access journals. See the Directory of Open Access Journals
Modify, if appropriate, any contract you sign with a publisher to ensure your right to use your work, including posting on a public archive. See the Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine
Use a Creative Commons license to mark your work with the freedoms you want it to carry.

More information:

Tools
Copyright Decision Map
(Minnesota)
Fair Use Checklist
(Columbia)
TEACH Act Toolkit
(NC State)
When Works Pass into the Public Domain
(UNC)

More Information
Know Your Copy Rights Brochure
(ARL)
Copyright Advisory Office
(Columbia)
Copyright Scenarios
(Minnesota)
U. S. Copyright Office

Tutorials
Crash Course in Copyright
(Texas)
Copyright Use
(NC State)

Linda Phillips
University Libraries