Negotiating Author-Friendly Publication Agreements — Things to Ask For

Instead of signing over copyright, you can offer a license for use of your work by a publisher.

An exclusive license gives the publisher exclusive rights to your work. Authors cannot license those rights to anyone else. Except where otherwise specified in your contract, you have no more right to make use of your own work than someone off the street does.

A work-for-hire agreement means that the author's employer completely owns any work created by employees as part of their jobs.

A non-exclusive license keeps copyright in your name but authorizes the publisher to use your work under terms stipulated in the publication agreement.

A limited license limits the use of or access to your work. Authors can limit the time period - for instance, you can assign rights to a publisher for one year, after which the rights revert back to you or become non-exclusive. You can also license a part of your bundle of rights (e.g., publication rights) without licensing other unneeded rights (e.g., public performance rights). Both exclusive and non-exclusive licenses can be limited.

To adopt a nonexclusive license, include a statement along the following lines:

Authors should limit their liability only to actual breaches of contract that they knowingly committed. Copyright Transfer Agreements often require authors to assume liability for any legal actions related to the contract. This is in the publisher's interest but not in the author's interest. Publishers should protect authors from frivolous lawsuits, not bill authors for the cost of the defense.

Part of the bundle of copyright is the right to make derivatives or changed versions of a creative work. Examples of this would be turning an article into a book chapter, incorporating text or graphics into subsequent publications, using portions of a work in other scholarly or teaching activities, and publishing new versions of a work, such as a translation. Transferring copyright to a publisher means losing these rights except what the publisher grants back or what is allowed under Fair Use exemptions. Ensure that your publication agreement gives you the right to republish your work and prepare derivatives, such as translations if that seems useful to you. If the publisher baulks, you can offer to give the publisher exclusive rights only for a specified period.

Moral rights are twofold.

• Right of attribution: the work must be attributed to the author, or the author may demand anonymity.
• Right of integrity: the work must not be intentionally distorted or misused in ways that contradict the authors' intent.

While it is customary for authors to be cited and their intent respected, US copyright law does not generally protect the moral rights of authors of textual works. To be enforceable, moral rights must be in your contract.

Publication agreements should state that the author has final approval for any substantive changes made to the manuscript before and after publication. The meaning of what constitutes "substantive" should be clear.

Publishers often require authors to obtain permission, and even personally pay royalty fees, to reproduce even small amounts of text or graphics in their publications. Under the fair use doctrine, minimal or transformative use of third-party materials is permissible without paying. You usually don't need written permission to quote briefly from someone else's book, for example, and don't let publishers tell you differently.

Authors should retain the right to share their work with students or peers and post the accepted manuscript in a reputable digital repository such as arXiv or DigitalCommons@UConn. The best option for authors is to be able to share their work anywhere with no embargo. If you transfer your copyright to a publisher, then you can only do this if the publisher grants this right back to you. If you retain your copyright and give the publisher a non-exclusive right to publish instead, you retain the right to post a version of your work wherever and whenever you wish. Publishers who do grant this right back to authors generally limit it to the final accepted author version, prior to copyediting changes.

The Author may reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, and publicly display the Article in any medium for non-commercial purposes and may authorize others to make any non-commercial use of the Work so long as the Author receives credit as author and the journal in which the Work has been published is cited as the source of first publication of the Article. For example, Author may post the Article on personal or institutional  websites and in other open-access digital repositories. (source)

Authors of books should include a copyright reversion clause. If the publisher fails to publish the book, lets the book go out of print, or stops paying royalties due to declining sales or poor marketing, then the author should be able to reclaim copyright.