Center for Digital Scholarship

If you are planning on publishing an article, the Center for Digital Scholarship has tools that you can use to retain your copyrights when working with a publisher.  Depending on the help you need the information or links below will help. When in doubt, please do not hesitate to email Ada Emmett, aemmett@ku.edu or Marianne Reed, mreed@ku.edu for further assistance. We can help you review publication agreements before you sign them.

For general information about the Open Access Policy see, http://openaccess.ku.edu.   

Below are links to information for KU faculty and students wishing to retain more of their copyrights on their own works of scholarship, and below that copyright basics for the classroom instructor.

Use & Negotiate for Your Copyrights

• Introduction to Publisher Agreements-- a short primer for authors by Tim Armstrong, a copyright specialist at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.
  
  
• Add the following language to your contract (next to your signature) to retain more of your copyrights so that you may share a copy openly in KU ScholarWorks: 

Notwithstanding the above language, I reserve the right to use this work in my teaching and research, for my colleagues at the University of Kansas to use this work in their teaching and research, and I also reserve the right to place an electronic copy of this work on a publicly accessible web site. 

• Use an addendum to publisher agreements, granting you, the author, more rights to your work. We suggest one of two:  
  • FACULTY ADDENDUM to publisher agreements -- requesting rights to share the publisher's published version
  • FACULTY ADDENDUM to publisher agreements -- requesting rights to share the accepted manuscript version (post- review, "author final draft")
  Both have been approved by KU's General Counsel.
  
  
• Understand your publisher policies on author self-archiving (on websites):
  • SHERPA/RoMEO provides detailed information about the kinds and degrees of permssions and rights that publishers automatically grant to their authors-- allowing them for example to post "author final drafts" of published articles on web sites or in institutional repositories (such as KU ScholarWorks).
    
    
• Know when and how to register copyright:
  • Although not a requirement to protect your works there are advantages to registering your works with the Copyright Office. 
  • Fees and procedures for submitting a registration via snail mail or the new online submission process.
    
    
• Fair use implications when you need permissions from copyright holders and how to contact such holders, from Columbia University. 
  
  
• Is it protected by copyright?  Use this innovative online Digital Copyright Slider rule to help determine whether a work is protected, http://www.librarycopyright.net/digitalslider/.