Managing Copyright

A Scholarly Communication Issues & Outreach Toolkit

AUDIENCE & PURPOSE: provided by the UC Libraries Scholarly Communication Officers Group for librarians who want to provide information to faculty authors on the issues surrounding copyright.

See sections below:

• Talking Points for Faculty Discussions
• More Information: UC Copyright Environment, Reusable Handouts, Faculty Resolutions, Readings

Talking Points for Faculty Discussions

WHAT: What is copyright?

• Copyright gives the author or creator of an original work, exclusive control of how a work is reproduced, distributed or performed.
• Copyright is a bundle of rights that can be transferred, in part or in full, from the author to a publisher.
• When copyright is transferred, authors no longer have control of how their work is distributed.
• An author can retain all rights but transfer to the publisher the single right of first publication.

WHY: Why should faculty care about copyright?

• Copyright places a barrier between their work and their potential readers.
• As authors of articles published in a scholarly journal, faculty will probably be asked to transfer their copyright, in full or in part, to the publisher as a condition of publication.
  • When faculty do not retain copyright they may lose the right to post copies of their work on their own website.
  • When faculty do not retain copyright they may not be able to legally make copies of their own work for distribution to students or colleagues.
• As an author, it is in a faculty member's own best interest to manage their copyright by transferring to the publisher only the single right of first publication. This allows faculty to maximize options for dissemination, i.e. to:
  • Freely post on their own website.
  • Legally distribute copies.
  • Deposit in an online repository
  • Include in new and derivative works
• By maximizing options for dissemination faculty are maximizing their work's potential reach and thereby maximizing the impact of their work. (More readers, more impact.)
• If faculty believe that scholars - not profit-driven, commercial publishers - should be the ones to control the distribution of the works that they themselves authored, then they should retain copyright.

WHY: Why does copyright matter to scholarly communication?

• The free flow of ideas is good for scholarship. When individual authors retain their copyright, they are serving the greater good of the scholarly community.
• When publishers have only the right of first publication, other forms of access become possible. New business models that provide new forms of access and new types of added value may put downward pressure on hyper-inflating journal prices.
• New forms of copyright management and publishing do not equate to "publishers going out of business" - the American Institute of Physics and other physics publishers have successful journals despite the availability of much of the same content in the open access physics arXiv.
• Authors' copyright retention gives faculty alternative ways to disseminate their work, for example through UC's eScholarship Repository.

HOW: How can a faculty member manage copyright?

• Consider and discuss the proposed UC Open Access Policy (under review Spring 2007) as a way to create a collective practice of retaining rights and enabling the University to take on the task of providing open access to your journal articles and conference proceedings.
• Change the copyright agreement by attaching an addendum to the publication agreement OR using this model publication agreement.
• Publish with publishers who have enlightened copyright policies.
  • Publisher Policies on submission of manuscripts to pubMed central (Univeristy of Rochester)
  • Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving: the SHERPA/ROMEO list
  Submitting an addendum or model agreement is important even if the publisher rejects it, and the faculty member chooses to publish with that publisher anyway. Publishers are likely to consider policy changes in response to requests from faculty authors.

More Information

UC Copyright Environment

• Proposed UC Open Access Policy (Spring 2007) and FAQ about it.
• Copyright Policy [HTML]
• Faculty Senate Copyright Whitepaper and Policy Proposal (Spring 2006) [HTML]
• UC Copyright Education Website [HTML]