Activity: Copyright and Sample Publication Contracts

Overview

Copyright is a form of intellectual property. Many products of human intellect can be privately owned—just like houses and cars are privately owned. The results of mental effort have been legally protected for a long time. Today, American copyright law is codified in the US Code and has been interpreted in many court decisions.

Activity: Copyright Crash Course

When you are publishing, you may encounter copyright questions when you’re considering your options to use content you do not own or when you’re managing your rights to your own work.

• For example, publishers may ask authors to promise that they have permission to include any third-party content.
  • Visit the UW Libraries Copyright Guide to learn about factors that influence a decision whether to use copyright-protected works.
• A publishing agreement, or contract, outlines the rights that are retained by the author and those that are granted to the publisher.
  • Review the page on “Making Sense of a Journal Publishing Agreement,” which describes the granting of rights to a publisher and the retention of rights by the author.
  • Also notice that as part of an agreement, the author submitting the manuscript (the “corresponding author”) typically confirms that they created the work and that all authors have been appropriately credited.
• Read the pages on “Deciding to Sign” and “Contract Negotiation.”
  • Before signing a publishing agreement, you’ll want to consider how it would impact what you want to do with your article in the future.
  • This could include incorporating an article in a thesis or dissertation or posting the article on a website.
• Finally, visit the website of a journal publisher in your field and look for their publishing agreement or copyright information, sometimes listed under a section titled “Instructions for Authors.”
  • For example: Cambridge University Press license to publish or Springer Nature License to Publish.
  • Does the agreement as written allow the author to share any version of the manuscript on the author’s personal webpage, institutional website, or in a non-commercial repository?