These days it is easy to put things on line — everyone has a web page and a graduate student or a member of the computer staff who can put PDFs of your articles and papers online for you even if you do not know how to do so yourself. The problem is not technical, its legal — every time you publish an article you sign an “author’s agreement” with a journal. If you are like me, you probably never read those agreements in detail and probably couldn’t understand the legalese even if you did. As a result a lot of us don’t feel comfortable putting PDFs of our articles on the web for anyone to access because we are afraid that we are violating our author’s agreements when we do so. Is there some way to avoid this problem? The answer, luckily, is yes.
Peter Hirtle has an excellent (and short!) solution to this problem in his article Author Addenda: An Examination of Five Alternatives First he summarizes the problem:
When an author publishes a book or a paper, many publishers ask the author to transfer all copyrights in the work to the publisher. But that is not always to the author’s advantage.
When authors assign to publishers all of the rights that comprise the bundle of rights known as copyright, they lose control over their scholarly output. Assignment of copyright ownership may limit the ability of authors to incorporate elements into future articles and books. Authors may not be able to use their own work in their teaching, or to authorize others at the institution or elsewhere to use materials.
One solution, he says, is an author’s addendum — a little bit of legalese that you add to the agreement with your publisher and sign that lets you save the rights you need in order to make your work open access.
Luckily, you do not have to write these addenda yourself — several organizations have already created legal boilerplate that you can use. In addition to SPARC (which we have already mentioned) he evaluates four other cut-and-paste addenda. There is lots of variation out there, so you should be able to find one that is right for you.
Now, some would say: Will my publisher ever allow me to use these addenda? The answer, surprisingly, is yes. Publishers often want your copyright so that they will not have legal problems everytime they want to add their collection to JSTOR or include their pieces in a reader or whatnot. An addendum that allows everyone — including them — access to your piece makes this easier for them. The other big concern of publishers is that you are going to put the same article in one of their competitor’s journals which of course is not the point of these addenda. On the whole, publishers are quite flexible if you let them know you are just going to include a copy of your article on your own website or on your institution’s website.
So give one of these addenda a try today and keep your grad students busy updating your website!
If you have any questions, please feel free to comment below and we’d be happy to answer them…
Tags: Author's Rights1 Comment
1 response so far ↓
The link to Hirtle’s article is wrong. You have to remove the dot after .html then it works!