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Copyright

A guide for Alice Lloyd College students and faculty to understand Federal copyright laws and McGaw Library policies.

Manage your Copyrights

Columbia University Copyright Advisory Office Director Kenneth Crews shares with author(s) in this 5 minute video "to carefully read publication agreements, negotiate for your rights, and keep a copy of all the agreements".

Sample Author Addendums

Many authors do not realize that when they sign an agreement with a publisher to publish their articles that they also shift their copyright to the publisher as well.  Retaining your rights as an author is important to ensure you can use your writings in teaching or as a foundation for future publications.  Attaching an author addendum to the publisher agreement will help ensure you retain the rights you need.

The following are examples of author addendums provided at other colleges indicating institutional support. 

  • SPARC Author Addendum
    A free resource developed by SPARC in partnership with Creative Commons and Science Commons. The SPARC Author Addendum is a legal instrument that modifies the publisher's agreement and allows you to keep key rights to your articles.
  • Author Addenda
    This is a list of author addenda. An author addendum is a proposed modification to a publisher's standard copyright transfer agreement. If accepted, it would allow the author to retain key rights, especially the right to authorize Open Access. The purpose is to help authors who are uncomfortable negotiating contract terms with publishers."
  • Science Commons: Scholar's Copyright Agreement
    "The Scholar's Copyright Addendum" provides an online form to generate a PDF form that can be attached to a journal publisher's copryight agreement to retain certain author rites.

Copyright Publisher Agreements

Authors routinely sign publishing agreements that transfer copyright to the publisher, eliminating the author's ability to submit the article or manuscript as required by law. As an author, you need to make sure that you retain the rights to upload either the published version or the final manuscript version of your article.

Attribution

Parts of this LibGuide are based on a LibGuide compiled by Heather L. Brown at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. All materials were used with permission.