The University of Kansas Libraries

Scholarly Communications-- Information for Authors

For Authors/Creators

• Use & Negotiate Copyright;
• Share my work widely, (explore alternative publishing, copyrights and data sharing models);
• Journal costs & impacts;
• Meet dissemination requirements (of grants, funders, universities).

Use & Negotiate Copyright

• Introduction to Publisher Agreements-- a short primer for authors by Tim Armstrong, a copyright specialist at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.
• Retain more of your copyright--The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition has several resources for authors.
• Use an addendum to publisher agreements, granting you, the author more rights to your work. There are several possiblities:
  • Recommended language for manuscipt contracts-- from the KU Copyright page and approved by KU's General Counsel.
  • The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine will help you generate a PDF form that you can attach to a journal publisher's copyright agreement to ensure that you retain certain rights
• Understand your publisher policies on author self-archiving (on websites):
  • "Journal Info" provides data such as impact factor, price per citation and price per article as well as publisher policies on author self-archiving.
  • SHERPA/RoMEO provides detailed information about the kinds and degrees of permssions and rights that publishers automatically grant to their authors-- allowing them for example to post "author final drafts" of published articles on web sites or in institutional repositories (such as KU ScholarWorks).
• Know when and how to register copyright:
  • Although not a requirement to protect your works there are advantages to registering your works with the Copyright Office. 
  • Fees and procedures for submitting a registration via snail mail or the new online submission process..
• Fair use implications when you need permissions from copyright holders and how to contact such holders, from Columbia University. Also see this site at Perdue's Copyright Management Center, which is older but very informative.
• Is it protected by copyright?  Use this innovative online Digital Copyright Slider rule to help determine whether a work is protected, http://www.librarycopyright.net/digitalslider/.

Share my work widely: Explore alternative publishing, copyrights and data sharing models

• Find and publish in open access journals in my discipline:
  • Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provies access to over 3,000 scholarly journals and over half are searchable at the article level.
  • Learn more about your publisher/journal's policies on author "self-archiving" through the SHERPA/RoMEO site.
• Add a Creative Commons license to your own creations for your class (learning objects) or other scholarly works: Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative or scholarly work with the freedoms they want it to carry.  (As an example note below how our pages offer a CC license.)
• Familiarize myself with and explore new models of publishing:
  • KU ScholarWorks: Universities have begun establishing institutional (digital) repositories of the scholarship of their faculty. These repositories hold peer reviewed journal literature as well as grey literature, reports, working papers, presentations, and data.  KU's ScholarWorks is the repository for the campus.  They offer an "open access" and complementary method to widely disseminate the scholarlship produced on campus.

Know journal costs & impacts

• Ulrich's provides subscription pricing information on journals, these are estimates and may be higher or lower than what KU's library is currently paying.  To access the Ulrich's site (it is a subscription site) please go through the libraries' database (by title) page, http://infogateway.ku.edu/index.cfm?type=dba2z#U.
• "Journal Info" provides for both impact factor and price per citation data.

Meet dissemination requirements (of grants, funders, universities)

• National Institutes of Health (NIH) revised its Public Access Policy and requirements for all grant recipients. See KU's Office of Research Integrity's site http://www.rcr.ku.edu/nih_public_access_policy/ for more information.
• KU University Senate resolution on access to scholarly information, which, among other matters calls on KU faculty to:
  • Seek amendments to publisher’s copyright transfer forms to permit the deposition of a digital copy of every article accepted by a peer-reviewed journal into the ScholarWorks repository, or a similar open access venue;
  • Become familiar with the business practices of journals and journal publishers in their specialty-- see the Journal Costs & Impacts section above.

Brought to you by the Scholarly Communications Working Group of the University of Kansas Libraries. Please contact Ada Emmett, aemmett@ku.edu, for questions or comments, additions or corrections to the above information.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.