: For Students, Faculty, and Staff 
Yesterday, in Day 2, we talked about how to check what permissions you have to your work. Today we’ll show you how to keep your rights the next time you publish.
International Open Access Week 2024
Step 3: Make things easier next time—keep your rights!
All federal funding agencies in the U.S. are expected to have policies by the end of next year requiring immediate open access to publications that include results from grant-supported projects.
To help you prepare for that change, we have decided to use Open Access Week to highlight the process of depositing your own work into disciplinary or institutional repositories—without paying expensive open access fees to publishers.
But if you don’t have the copyright to your work, you don’t have the legal right to deposit your own work in a repository like arXiv or the University Digital Conservancy (UDC). (Important caveat: if your work was federally funded, there’s a decent chance that even if you transfer your copyright to a publisher, you’ll still be able to deposit your work in a federal repository—more on why that’s the case will be discussed tomorrow.)
Instead of agreeing to transfer your copyright when you publish, you may also decide to negotiate with your publisher to keep the copyright to your work instead. Not only can negotiating for your rights make depositing your work in repositories simpler, but it also allows you to readily reuse your work in the future.
Daily to-do: Consider negotiating with a publisher for your rights for an existing work, or read and save one pre-existing author’s addenda that can help you keep your rights in the future to your reference document.
Yesterday, we asked you to pick a publication and decide whether you could share it in a repository. If the answer was “no,” consider starting a negotiation with your publisher. Even if the answer was “yes,” you should review some of the pre-existing addenda that can help you continue to keep you rights for your future publications.
What rights do publishers need?
Publishers want all of your rights to the work you create…but they don’t have to have them.
They need a non-exclusive right to publish, distribute, archive, and preserve the work.
Take control of your work by keeping your rights! Carefully review the publishing agreement before you sign it, or publish in an open access journal that doesn’t ask you to give up your rights to your work.
Negotiating with your publisher
Always be sure to carefully read any agreement you sign—even if it’s just checking a box—with the publisher. If you want to make changes, don’t sign (or “click through” in the publisher’s system) the agreement! Instead, contact the journal’s editor to let them know what you want to change. Several useful pre-existing addenda exist. The Big Ten Academic Alliance, the open access advocacy organization SPARC, and Creative Commons have template author addenda available. The default BTAA addendum requires you to wait 6 months before depositing your article in a repository (although you can change this!); SPARC’s addenda allows you to deposit it immediately.
Negotiating can feel intimidating or challenging. If you’re having some writer’s block, consider using this email draft as a starting point:
Hello,
I would like to submit an article to your journal, <Journal Name>. If my article is accepted, I would like to ensure that I retain my copyright so I can deposit a copy into a repository. I have an addendum to the journal’s author agreement that I’d like to use, and I would like to ensure that the addendum is correctly submitted. Where is the best place for me to upload this kind of material in the journal’s submission system?
Thank you for your time,
<Your Name>
If you’ve already submitted or published your article…
Unfortunately, once you’ve published an article, the editors or publisher of the journal may be unwilling to allow you to reclaim some of your rights. But you can (and should) still ask! Especially if the article was published a few years ago—or if it might be covered by a funder policy or by a University open policy—it could be worth sending them an email.
Here’s a draft of what that email could look like:
Hello,
Thank you for publishing my article, <Article Title>, in the <volume/issue> of <Journal Name>. I believe that the author agreement I signed when my article was submitted transferred its copyright to the journal or the journal’s publisher. However, I was wondering if you all would be open to reverting the copyright back to me. If that is not possible, I would like to confirm whether I can still deposit a copy of the manuscript version into a repository.
Thank you for your time,
<Your Name>
Need more help negotiating your rights? The University Libraries has copyright experts available to consult with you. For more information, visit the Libraries’ website or contact copyinfo@umn.edu.
How to find a publisher that will let you keep your rights
If you don’t want to negotiate, consider picking an open access journal, where you get to keep the rights to your own work. The Directory of Open Access Journals can help you find information about more than 20,000 fully open-access journals — and around two-thirds of these journals are “diamond open access,” meaning they will not charge author fees and are more likely to allow authors to retain their copyright.
The Libraries support many diamond open access journals. A list of our current partnerships is available here. The Libraries is also a diamond open access publisher through Publishing Services, which publishes a number of fully open-access journals across a variety of subjects.
Need help finding the right journal to publish in? Contact your subject librarian for help.
