ScholarWorks@UMass Boston: Copyright and Permissions

To learn more about posting articles, research, working papers, and other publications to your UMass Boston Author Page, consult these Frequently Asked Questions.

For additional information, please contact the ScholarWorks Support Team.

Creating Change in Scholarly Communication

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) recently retooled and republished its Create Change resource. The site has been updated to provide faculty with current information, perspectives, and tools that will enable them to play an active role in advancing scholarly information exchange in the networked environment. The new Create Change website is based around the idea that the ways faculty share and use academic research results are changing rapidly and irreversibly. By posing the question, “Shouldn’t the way we share research be as advanced as the Internet?” the site outlines how faster and wider sharing of journal articles, research data, simulations, syntheses, analyses, and other findings fuels the advance of knowledge. It also offers practical ways faculty can look out for their own interests as researchers.

Authors Rights and SPARC Author Addendum

SPARC’s Author Rights educational initiative provides information and resources for faculty about the SPARC Author Addendum, a legal form that enables authors of journal articles to modify publishers’ copyright transfer agreements to allow authors to keep key rights to their articles.

You can view the SPARC Author Addendum in PDF or in Word. Attach this addendum to the publisher agreement that you sign just before a new article is to be published.

Suggested Steps for Acquiring Permission to Add Materials to ScholarWorks

1. First, determine who owns copyright for the work. If possible, authors should look at the agreements signed during the publication process to see if such use is permissible.
2. If a signed agreement cannot be located or if the agreement is not clear on whether electronic reprints are permissible, the next step is to locate the publisher's policy. Many known policies for academic publishers are listed on the SHERPA/RoMEO website.
3. If the publisher is not listed on the SHERPA/RoMEO website, the publisher should be contacted directly. Often a quick online search will lead to contact information for authors' rights management offices within a publisher's site. Templates for permissions request letters that can be used when contacting publishers, as well as other information about copyright, is available through the link below:

• Digital Common's Copyright Toolkit.

Licensing Your Copyrighted Work

An easy way to protect and share your copyrighted work is through a Creative Commons license. Learn more about Creative Commons here.