Copyright, Publishing, and Intellectual Property

Publishing Resources

The following links lead to external resources that provide information about and assistance with various aspects of publishing. UCLA librarians and library staff also provide services in this area.

Your Rights as an Author

• Don't I Own My Own Work?" Negotiating to Keep Your Copyright: UCLA Library presentation for faculty lunch series
• Retain Certain Rights: From the UC Office of Scholarly Communication; explains which rights to retain when you publish and offers models for modifying author agreements
• UC Policy on Copyright Ownership
• Creative Commons: Offers tools and license agreements for creators and authors that provide options for retaining rights and for providing notice to end users about what they can do without obtaining permission from the creator or copyright owner
• Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine: Generates a PDF form that can be attached to a journal publisher's copyright agreement to retain certain rights
• Author's Rights, Tout de Suite: Gives journal article authors a quick introduction to key aspects of author rights

Making Your Work More Visible via Open Access

• Major Open-Access Publishers: BioMed Central (200+ peer-reviewed journals in science, technology, medicine), Hindawi Publishing Corporation (200+ peer-reviewed journals in science, technology, medicine), Public Library of Science (seven peer-reviewed biomedical journal)
• UC eScholarship: Provides free, persistent access to postprints, seminar/symposia proceedings, and journals and peer-reviewed series
• Directory of Open-Access Journals: Lists more than five thousand scholarly and scientific journals whose content is available online at no charge; some charge a publication fee to the author
• Open-access Disciplinary/Subject Archives: arXiv (physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics), PubMed Central (biomedical and life sciences), Social Science Research Network, AgEcon Search, Cogprints (psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, computer science)

Using Copyrighted Material

• Fair Use Checklist: From the Columbia University Libraries Copyright Advisory Office
• Fair Use Evaluator: Online tool from the American Library Association
• Permissions: Also from Columbia University; outlines what to do when permission is required
• Copyright Term and the Public Domain: Chart from the Cornell University Copyright Information Center
• Digital Copyright Slider: Tool that tells whether something published originally in the United States is protected by copyright
• U.S. Copyright Law: Fair Use
• UC Copyright Education Web Site: Fair Use

Understanding Your Publisher

• SHERPA/RoMEO: database summarizing publishers' copyright transfer agreements
• Eigenfactor: Ranks journals in the natural and social sciences according to citation influence; also measures journal price and cost effectiveness

NIH Public Access Policy

• UCLA Library Web page: provides information and links to resources to help comply with this new policy

News

• Copyright Advisory Network: A blog from the American Library Association Office of Information Technology Policy
• Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: A blog on open access issues by a Canadian librarian