Four things that authors definitely need to know
An author can find out a lot about copyright, but scientists and scholars are not necessarily experts on the subject. There are, however, a number of things that an author definitely needs to know.
In many cases, you are permitted to do more than you may think, but there are some instances where you cannot do as much as you might want to do (or will want to do at a later date).
1. When you are going to sign a contract with a publisher, you can negotiate regarding the rights that you will transfer.
If you want to make use of your work yourself in addition to having it published by the publisher, you should make sure that that is stipulated in the contract, or you should grant a non-exclusive licence. SURF has drawn up a document setting out a number of rights that the author can retain.
Publishers increasingly wish to make different arrangements in this regard. SURF is therefore working on a toolkit that provides standard contractual provisions and enables you to generate standard contracts. (Further information will be provided on this website in due course.)
2. Copyright is intended not just to protect an author’s rights but also to promote the freedom and exchange of information.
As a scientist or scholar, you can contribute to the freedom of information by dealing carefully with your copyright, for example what components you wish to continue to control, what components you will release, and what components you will transfer to a third party.
You should take a look, for example, at the Creative Commons website. This is the Dutch version of a successful American initiative to encourage the distribution of scientific and scholarly work via the Internet, including work that is subject to copyright, without infringing copyright. By granting a Creative Commons licence, an author can specify precisely what use he/she permits and what type of use is prohibited.
3. Did you know that thousands of open-access peer-reviewed periodicals are included in the Directory of Open Access Journals?
A lot of new publication methods have been developed in recent years, including in your own discipline. These open-access peer-reviewed periodicals have impact factors and citation figures that are comparable to those of traditional peer-reviewed periodicals. You can find more information about Open Access on the Open Access theme page.
4. It’s easy for you to contribute to this shift in scientific/scholarly publishing.
- Check out the possibilities of Open Access. The SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN) gives a clear explanation of what Open Access actually means and what the various options are. SOAN is a monthly newsletter with news and analysis about Open Access, the international trend towards making scientific/scholarly research material available online free of charge and without unnecessary licence conditions.
- Publish your articles in an open-access periodical.
- Read and quote from open-access periodicals and promote their use by your colleagues.
- Make use of open-access repositories. All the Dutch universities have set up a repository in which thousands of articles are already available.
- Keep track of experiments by fellow researchers and institutions.
- Keep track of experiments by publishers, a number of which are also engaged in various activities in this field.