Open Access and Scholarly Communication at Ferris State University: Author Rights

When you write an article, book, chapter, or other scholarly work, your publisher will ask you to sign an author's agreement. This document is sometimes also called a "publication agreement," or "copyright transfer agreement." This document will typically include a statement about who owns the copyright to the written work in question, any other (exclusive or non-exclusive) rights granted to you as the author and those reserved by your publisher, as well as terms for royalties (if applicable), and preferred methods of citation for the work.

Many author's agreements ask you to sign over your copyright to the publisher, making them the copyright holder for the written work in question. If you are agreeing to sign over your copyright, it is important to make sure you retain certain rights to your work. Things to look for include:

• the ability to put a copy of the work on your personal website
• the ability to deposit a copy of the work in your institutional repository
• the ability to republish the work in another form in the future
• the ability to use, reproduce, and distribute the work in your teaching and professional activities (such as conference presentations and lectures)
• the moral right to be recognized as the author of a work 

If you have questions about what your author's agreement means, contact the General Counsel's office.

(Information shared from the University of Michigan's Guide to Graduate Publishing with the author's permission.)

As a scholar, it's likely you want to see the widest possible distribution for your work in order to ensure that it can be read and shared with colleagues, the general public, or other interested parties. Open Access is a movement to provide unrestricted access to research, without many of the traditional restrictions related to copyright, licensing, subscriptions, and fees associated with many commercial and academic publishers.

Choosing to publish in an Open Access journal can help you achieve a larger audience for your work because it will not be hidden behind a restrictive or expensive subscription, help you share your work more widely because you will not need to worry about infringing on a publisher's copyright, and make it easier to retain many of the rights detailed above.

(Information shared from the University of Michigan's Guide to Graduate Publishing with the author's permission.)

A public license according to Wikipedia is "a license by which a licensor can grant additional copyright permissions to licensees and in which either the licenses or both the licensees and licensors are unlimited."  One of the more common public licenses is Creative Commons.

Infographic: What is Creative Commons?

By Aditya Dipankar (Folography). (2013). Retrieved from http://visual.ly/what-creative-commons