Know your rights as an author. The SPARC brochure on Author Rights is a good place to learn these.
Review all publication agreements and retain rights to enhance the usability of your work. Negotiate with journal publishers to retain all or some of your rights, such as:
Review license possibilities such as the SPARC's license addendum or Creative Commons' licenses.
Submit articles to journals that allow the author to retain partial or full copyright of your work. Consult Sherpa-RoMEO to view what publishers allow in terms of retaining rights.
Comply with the NIH Public Access Policy and deposit your NIH funded manuscript into PubMed Central.
Contribute to journals with reasonable business models. See Journal Inflation Information page.
Support open-access publishers and reasonably priced non-profit publishers by submitting papers to them instead of to costly commercial journals. If you are an editor of an expensive journal, consider moving your journal to a different publisher. Consult the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) to find an open access journal.
Invite the Lovejoy Library faculty to give a presentation to your department or program or for a personal consultation on any of the issues related to Scholarly Communications. Presentations can be scheduled at Lovejoy Library or a location of your choice.
Boycott unreasonably expensive journals. Examine the pricing and licensing agreements of journals you contribute to as an author, reviewer, or editor. If possible, refuse to contribute to or edit for journals from publishers who practice "predatory pricing." For information on the effects of journal inflation and examples of high price journals see Sticker Shock.
Familiarize yourselves with studies of journal costs. Contact your subject librarian to find out more about the cost of journals in your field or use these other resources and studies on the cost and value of journals.
PDF presentation on "Author Rights" from Washington University School of Medicine
MIT's "Retaining Rights & Increasing the Impact of Your Research"
The Association of Research Libraries "Reserving Rights of Use in Works Submitted for Publication: Negotiating Publishing Agreements." From the IUPUI Copyright Management Center, this document provides "simple steps to protect your rights through better contracts with publishers" and sample addenda to attach to publishing agreements.
KeepYourCopyrights.org – This website is designed to help those who create stuff — whether they are filmmakers, musicians or academic authors — understand and manage their copyrights.
Sample Forms for Amending Licensing Agreements
