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Academic Publishing Guide, designed for Drake Faculty and Researchers

In This Section:

Author's Rights

Thinking about your rights as an author

All that follows is information adapted from the SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) website. SPARC is a global advocacy organization working to make research and education open and equitable by design.

1. 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 Websites, 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.

2. Think about Retaining Your Rights as the Author

Retain Your Author's Rights 

 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.  Some available options:

3. Advice on SPARC Author Addendum or Creative Commons License

What if the Publisher Rejects the Author Addendum or Creative Commons License?

  • Explain to the publisher why it is important for you to retain the rights to your own work.
  • Ask the publisher to articulate why the license rights provided under the SPARC Author Addendum or Creative Commons license are insufficient to allow publication.
  • Evaluate the adequacy of the publisher’s response in light of the reasonable and growing need for authors to retain certain key rights to their works.
  • Consider publishing with an organization that will facilitate the widest dissemination of their authors’ works, to help them fulfill their personal and professional goals as scholars.

4. Submitting your Work to eScholarShare@Drake Guidelines

eScholarShare is the open access repository of Drake University that collects, preserves, and distributes materials produced or maintained by the Drake community. Please contact Bart Schmidt, bart.schmidt@drake.edu if you would like your work included in eScholarShare.

Author With Copyright: 

Any author publishing work in eScholarShare@Drake must either be the copyright owner for the work or have the permission of the copyright holder to publish it in the Repository.

If the author retains copyright for their submission, no further efforts are required, and they may proceed to the submission process.

Author Without Copyright:

If the author does not maintain copyright, he/she still may be able to submit material to the repository. Many publishers will allow placement in an institutional repository of articles published in their journals or books as a form of "self archiving" in pre-print or post-print form. SHERPA-RoMEO provides information by publisher on what kind of self-archiving activity is allowed for articles in their journals, and one can search for a particular journal and its policies here. If after consulting these sources and/or the publisher, an author is unable to determine whether they retain the right to post their material in the repository, they can email bart.schmidt@drake.edu for assistance.

Preserve Self Archiving Rights:

Remember, authors can always preserve basic self archiving rights when negotiating copyright issues in book and journal contracts. The SPARC Author Addendum contains language that allows for the posting of published documents in an institutional repository, and can be attached to any publisher’s publication agreement.  Authors are encouraged to use this form or otherwise protect their rights when submitting documents to a publisher.

Definitions

Author Pre-Print version: the author copy PRIOR to any peer-review – [usually the initial submission for publication].

Author Post-Print version: the author copy POST peer review but PRIOR to any publisher formatting, copyediting, pagination, etc.

Publisher PDF version: the actual article as it appeared in the publication.  All peer-review, formatting, copyediting and pagination has been included.