Introduction to Author Rights
Who owns the rights to your article after it is published?
Are you allowed to post the work on online platforms for further distribution?
Can you share the work in conferences or in your educational activities?
Before publishing your article in any given journal, it is very important to consider these questions. Always be sure to check the journal’s publication policy prior to submitting your article and before signing the final publication agreement. When in doubt, ask questions to make sure that you understand the terms. If possible, consult with professors, librarians or peers to obtain their advice.
In this section, we talk about Sherpa Romeo. You can use this online tool to quickly learn what dissemination options will be available to you after publishing your article in a specific journal. Using this tool, you will find that many journals allow you to share your work through institutional or subject repositories even after publishing your paper.
This section also talks about author addendums, which are documents you can use to negotiate the terms of a publication agreement. An addendum can help you retain some rights over your work after publication. Librarians at the GRIC have developed an author addendum for use by members of UPRM's academic community. You can find links to this document below.
We also encourage you to take a look at the following link. This link leads to a page titled "Retaining Rights", which is part of MIT Libraries' Scholarly Publishing online guide. It explains why it can be very beneficial to authors to retain rights over their academic products. Although the contents of this page are geared to MIT authors, they can be helpful to anyone.
Retaining Rights (MIT Libraries) - https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/retaining-rights
Sherpa Romeo
Sherpa Romeo is a service that aggregates policy information from different publishers and journals. This online tool can help you see how much control you retain over the dissemination of your research product after you publish in a given journal. For example, you can use Sherpa Romeo to find out what version of your paper (submitted manuscript, accepted version, or published version) you are allowed to deposit in your institutional repository to give the work more visibility. The tool also tells you if you need to comply with any embargo period.
Use Sherpa Romeo to make sure you comply with the policies of the journal you published in while also giving maximum visibility to your work. We encourage you to consult with a librarian if you need assistance with this resource.
For a quick slide presentation on how to use Sherpa Romeo, click here or on the image below.
Videos
You can also watch the following videos to learn more about Sherpa Romeo.
UPRM Author Addendum
As part of its scholarly communications services, the GRIC has developed an author addendum template for members of the UPRM researcher community. This document can be used to negotiate modifications to the terms of a publication agreement. By modifying these terms, the author can retain more rights over their work, and therefore may be able to disseminate the work more widely through online repositories, websites, conferences, educational activities and other venues. This document was approved by UPRM's Office of Legal Affairs.
The use of this document is of particular importance to graduate students who publish an article and may want to use the contents of the paper on a later project, such as their thesis, dissertation, or project report.
Please know that the use of author addendums is pretty common nowadays. Although every specific case is different, it is not rare for publishing companies to accept the terms of an addendum.
Below, you will find links to English and Spanish versions of our author addendum in pdf and docx format.
English Version:
Versión en español:
Links to Author Addendums by Other Entities
You may want to look at these other author addendums to further inform yourself on this matter. You may also wish to use them as models for your own negotiation purposes.
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is an organization that promotes free sharing of research outputs.
MIT Amendment to Publication Agreement
This document is meant for MIT authors, but it can serve as a model or as a valuable information resource to anyone.