Before Submitting Your Work for Publication
As an author, you own the copyright of your manuscript exclusively. You have the right to:
- Reproduce your work in different formats e.g. online files
- Distribute copies of your work
- Prepare any derivative works e.g. translations
- Perform or display the work to the public e.g. via personal website, institutional repository, social media, open access repositories
- Share or transfer some of, or all of your rights to others e.g. via Creative Commons
- Is a licensing platform to let authors share their knowledge and creativity
- Provides free, simple and standardize way to give the public permission to use your work
- Offers a menu of choices for you to license others to use your work
During Submission & Review
After you submit a manuscript to a journal or publisher, it may undergo several reviews before final acceptance. To understand your rights during this process, read SPARC's page,
An introduction to Copyright Resources for Authors. When the
accepted version of your article is ready to be published, the publisher may ask you to sign "Copyright Transfer Agreement". You must understand the agreement; and may try to keep some key rights by negotiating through an "author addendum". Here are some tools and samples:
After Your Work is Published
After your work is formally published, it is the
published version. In most cases, the copyright of the published version is owned by the publisher, unless you kept some rights (e.g. via an addendum). Copyright of an open access article may still be owned by a publisher. You can check the details of publishers' copyright & self-archiving policies through this tool,
SHERPA/Romeo.
Using others people's work
Read the Library Guide - Copyright.
Image source: https://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/articles/ scholarly-communication-issues-around-scholarly-collaboration-networks (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
