It is not a requirement of publication that all rights be assigned or transferred permanently to a publisher. The right to publish can be licensed to the publisher temporarily or on a non-exclusive basis.
Because the law allows you to transfer copyright while holding back rights for yourself and others, SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has created an Addendum to preserve the right to post your scholarly articles on your own website and to deposit them in an institutional repository, such as the ODU Digital Commons.
Open-access archiving is becoming an expectation – and in some cases a requirement – for scholars. As such, more publishers are allowing it in some form, whether it be the publisher pdf or your postprint (final author version after peer-review).
Online tool: Complete Author Addendum Online -- Enter basic information about your article and generate a printable addendum to your publishing agreement in one easy step. Produced by Science Commons, the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine features an updated version of the SPARC Author Addendum.
Author Rights Video
This brief video, produced by the Institute on Scholarly Communication in association with SPARC, explains how researchers can maximize exposure and dissemination for their peer-reviewed article manuscripts.
