Author Rights and Rights Retention

Tri-Agency-funded researchers:  The revised Tri-Agency Open Access Policy requires authors to retain sufficient rights to make an accepted manuscript or version of record openly available immediately upon publication in a repository and to apply an open licence. Rights retention should be considered when reviewing publication agreements and negotiating with publishers.

When an author creates an original piece of work, copyright to that work is automatically assigned to the author.  In a scholarly context, this means that authors automatically have the right to use, share, and distribute their work in a variety of ways, including: 

• Make copies of the work for educational use, including class notes, study guides or electronic reserves
• Use part of the work as a basis for a future publication
• Present the work at conference or meeting and give copies of the work to attendees
• Deposit the work in an institutional or funding agency repository

But when you, the author, work with a traditional publisher to distribute your work, they may ask you to transfer copyright or grant exclusive rights to distribute your work. Once these rights are transferred or exclusively licensed to the publisher, authors may be required to obtain permission from the publisher before sharing or reusing their work in ways not permitted by the publishing agreement.

In order to help scholars retain important author rights, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) developed the original SPARC Author Addendum. The Canadian Author Addendum to Publication Agreement is an adaptation of the SPARC Author Addendum for the Canadian context and can help authors negotiate to retain rights needed to share, reuse, and make their work openly available. The accompanying CARL Guide to Using the Canadian Author Addendum provides practical guidance on how to use the addendum.
 
The CARL Guide to Author Rights seeks to situate use of the addendum within the broader context of copyright and ownership of scholarly works, including how rights retention can be taken into consideration at each stage of the publication lifecycle. This guide may assist both authors and librarians in knowing when and how to use the addendum as well as informing a broader understanding of author rights as they pertain to the creation and dissemination of academic research.

Using the Canadian Author Addendum to Publication Agreement:

1. Download and complete the addendum at http://www.carl-abrc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Cdn_author_addendum_EN_2019.pdf
2. Submit the addendum with your publishing agreement or through the publisher's submission process, as appropriate.
3. Inform the publisher that you are requesting retention of the rights described in the addendum.
4. Retain copies of all correspondence and agreements.

If you have questions about author rights, rights retention, publication agreements, or Tri-Agency Open Access Policy compliance, please contact scholarship@uwindsor.ca