Authors' Rights and Publishing

The Boston Library Consortium's Board of Directors has approved unanimously the adoption of the "Agreement to Extend Authors' Rights," a document that gives authors and their employing institutions non-exclusive rights to use, distribute, and reproduce material in electronic digital or print form in activities connected with the author's academic and professional activities. The amendment also supports placement of material in institutional repositories. The agreement, initially developed by MIT, a Consortium member, is available for downloading here:

• Agreement to Extend Authors' Rights (Word document)

• Agreement to Extend Authors' Rights (PDF)

The BLC Scholarly Communication Project has developed this web page to educate authors about their rights in scholarly publishing and provide access to relevant resources on this topic.

The group has also created an informational brochure about authors' rights that institutions can use as-is or modify to best meet their needs.

What Authors Should Know

Traditional copyright agreements transfer all authors' rights to the publisher. Under such restrictive agreements, it is illegal for you to photocopy your published article for students, post it on your website, or present it at a conference without obtaining copyright permission from your publisher. Usually, payment of a fee is involved.

If you don't specifically require that these and other rights remain yours, they become the publisher's rights, not yours! For a more comprehensive list of rights that you can retain through an author's amendment, visit Cornell University's website on Copyright Management: What Faculty Can Do.

The costs of permissioning your works will probably not come directly out of your own pocket, but instead will be paid by your academic department or university library. However, you may indirectly feel the financial strain of traditional copyright agreements, through cuts in your departmental budget or your library's journal subscriptions. So, amending your copyright agreements saves money for your university and ensures less restricted access to your work.  

What Authors Can Do

Scholarly authors are concerned that some prestigious journals do not currently accept amendments to their copyright agreements. This is a particular issue for those seeking tenure. However, faculty who persist are finding in some cases that they are able to change publishers' policies. Continued efforts are needed in order to move further forward in advancing authors' rights.

For a comprehensive list of publishers' current policies on authors' rights, visit Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving, a website sponsored by the SHERPA and ROMEO scholarly publishing initiatives.

Educating your graduate students about the future of their rights as authors and what to expect from publishers is also an excellent way to encourage change from the very beginnings of their participation in scholarly publishing.

Have you had success using the BLC's Agreement to Extend Authors' Rights? Please let us know! Contact us at admin@blc.org to share your experiences.  

Resources for Authors and Advocates

From the BLC

• Authors' Rights Informational Brochure (Word document)
  We have created this 2-sided brochure to provide authors with some basic information about how the Agreement to Extend Authors' Rights can help them and their institutions, and about how they in turn can engage with the issues. BLC member institutions are welcome to modify this document in any way, including the addition of their own logos.

• Authors' Rights Informational Brochure
  If you would like to use the brochure as-is, this PDF file can be downloaded and printed.

• List of BLC Institutional Repositories
  To add or update your repository's listing, please contact us at admin@blc.org.

Informational Websites About Scholarly Communication

• Faculty Speak Out about Scholarly Communication Issues (Association of Research Libraries' Scholarly Communication website)

• SPARC: Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

• Transforming Scholarly Communication and Libraries (Cornell University Library)

More Materials to Help You Spread the Word

• BioMed Central: Advocacy

• Create Change Brochure

• Create Change: Other Tools

• AAUP-ARL Statement on Scholarly Communication (PDF)

• University of Kentucky: Changing Scholarly Publishing (PDF)

• University of California, Berkeley: Scholarly Publishing: Statement of Principles (PDF)

• IFLA Statement on Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Research (PDF)