LibGuides: Scholarly Communication: Sharing Your Research

Author's Rights

As a copyright holder, you may choose to transfer some or all of your rights to your work (detailed in Section 106 of U.S. copyright law) to a publisher or license your work under specific use terms. It's important to understand your options, so you can make an informed choice that will allow you to share your work how you want to in the future.

An Introduction to Copyright Resources for Authors
This resource by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition details why authors should secure the rights to their work and how they can do it when submitting journal articles to publishers.
Keep Your Copyrights
Developed for U.S. authors by the Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts and the Program on Law & Technology at Columbia Law School, Keep Your Copyrights was created to "encourage a more proactive attitude toward copyright management." The site contains sections on copyright and contracts, as well as a glossary of related legal and business terms.
Creative Commons
A global nonprofit, Creative Commons offers a series of free copyright licenses that authors can apply to their works to specify what rights they retain and what use permissions they grant the public. Before generating a license using the License Chooser, authors should read Considerations for Licensors and Licensees.
BGSU Copyright Policy
This document details the university's official copyright policy for faculty, staff, and student authors.

Pre-prints, Post-prints, and Publisher PDFs

Depending on publisher policy and the agreement you signed, you may be able to make a version of your article publicly available on your website, in a disciplinary repository, and in ScholarWorks, BGSU's publishing platform.

Publisher self-archiving policies will specify which version of your article you can post online. The most common are:

Pre-print: the version of your article before peer-review;
Post-print (also called a final accepted manuscript): the version of your article after peer-review but before publisher formatting and design; and
Publisher's PDF: the final version of your article that appears on the publisher's website.

For more information about the different versions of an article, check out Pre-prints, Post-prints, and Publisher's PDF Explained.

Sherpa Romeo
If you're unsure if your publisher allows self-archiving, you can search for their policy using Sherpa Romeo. Maintained by UK-based non-profit Jisc, Sherpa Romeo is a database of the self-archiving policies of over 4,000 publishers. Each journal's record lists the article versions you can self-archive, notes if there's a required embargo period, and links to the complete policy on the publisher's website.
Article and Data Sharing Requirements by Federal Agency
Hosted by SPARC, this resource tracks article sharing and data sharing policies of federal funding agencies and allows users to view and compare the policies of up to three agencies at a time.

Didn't Keep the Earlier Versions of Your Articles?

If the publisher doesn't allow you to post the final version of your article and you didn't keep your manuscripts, it's possible you may still be able to retrieve them from the publisher's manuscript submission system.

Direct2AAM provides step-by-step instructions on how to download your final accepted manuscript from several major systems, including:

ScholarOne (Taylor & Francis, Cambridge University Press, and Emerald journals)
eJournalPress (Nature et al.)
Editorial Manager (Elsevier and SpringerNature journals)

The guide is in development, and instructions for additional systems will be added in the future.