Scholarship, research, teaching, learning, and professional activities often result in the creation of original works. Many rights are automatically granted to the author(s) or creator(s) regardless of whether the work is published or unpublished. Timely action can help secure additional rights:
Some or all of a copyright owner's rights may be transferred (i.e., given or sold) to another party—this is also known as "assigning" your rights. The agreement must be in writing (i.e., a contract) and signed by the owner or the owner's authorized agent. Transfer of a right on a nonexclusive basis does not require a written agreement. For information pertaining to your circumstance, consult an attorney.
Transferring some of your rights (e.g., to a publisher, record label, or end users) can help ensure distribution of your work, but you can also choose to retain certain rights for yourself. Today, many authors are signing amended publisher agreements that permit them to retain certain rights associated with non-profit personal, professional, or educational activities (e.g., sharing one's work with colleagues or uploading a copy to a digital repository). This idea of selectively retaining rights has become a central point in reshaping the concept of scholarly communication.
Publishers naturally want to protect investments and value for the materials they distribute. As such, publication agreements have typically required the transfer of all copyrights from an author to the publisher. These agreements can severely curtail the author's options for use or distribution of a work, even in academic activities such as teaching, peer assessment, or archiving.
In response to lobbying from authors and rights groups, today's publishing agreements are often negotiable, and publishers are increasingly sensitive to the academic author's need for flexibility regarding non-commercial uses of copyrighted works.
These model agreement addenda provide language that authors can use to retain some or all of their rights when publishing or distributing their works.
You can also contact the library's Scholarly Communications department with any questions about negotiating agreements with publishers.
Authors and creators can assign their work a Creative Commons license that grants permission for others to freely use the content with some restrictions.
There are six Creative Commons licenses that specify different conditions and limitations for such free use to occur. As long as people respect the conditions and limitations established by a work's assigned license they can utilize the content without obtaining the copyright holder's express permission beforehand.
Creative Commons licenses make copyrighted content more easily shareable while still allowing copyright holders to specify how and when their content may be used.