Scholarly Communication
CONTROL YOUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Do not sign away your rights!
Do not automatically sign the publisher's "Copyright Transfer Agreement." Use the Addendum To Publication Agreements For CIC Authors (.doc) when you submit a publication to a publisher.
This will allow you to:
- Maintain the right to disseminate your work
- Maintain the right to use your work in your classes
- Maintain the right to post your work on your own website
- Maintain the right to post and archive your work in your Institutional Repository
- Reserve the right to post the pre-refereed or even post-refereed version of your paper
- Allow for the largest possible audience
What Can You Do?
COPYRIGHT AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Some publishers require you to sign away your rights to your intellectual property in order to have your research published. In such cases, you may lose all control over further reproduction or dissemination of your work. You may need to seek the publisher's permission to use your own work in a course packet, or to post it on your personal website or in an institutional repository. Further, your institution's library is often forced to pay prohibitively high prices to buy back access to the work that you freely gave to the publisher. Thus, you and your institution could find yourselves locked out from your own published research.
Controlling access to your work makes a lot of sense for publishers, many of whom are realizing huge profits by doing so, but increasing publisher control of intellectual property represents a grave threat to the scholarly communication system. As a scholar working in a milieu where the rewards of publishing are impact and prestige rather than personal monetary gain, you presumably want the largest possible audience for your work, and the ability to disseminate it however you see fit. Signing over your intellectual property rights is often at odds with these goals.
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COPYRIGHT AND FAIR USE
