Academic Writing: Publishing Articles and Sharing Your Work

Before you sign the publisher's agreement, consider how you may want to use that work in the future. 

• Do you want to use the work in your classroom? 
• Do you want to publish the paper in an institutional repository? 
• Do you want to use the data set in a future paper? 
• Are you federally mandated to post the paper in an open-access repository? 

Read through the publisher's agreement carefully to see what rights of reuse you will retain and what acts the publisher prohibits. The resources below will help you become more comfortable with copyright terms and policies as well as your own rights and responsibilities as an author. You may also modify the publisher's agreement using the Scholars Copyright Addendum.

When a journal accepts your work for publication, they often assume a copyright over the work. You may think that because you wrote the paper, you are free to post a copy of it on your website, submit it to a digital repository or otherwise reuse the work. This is not necessarily the case. Common misperceptions about copyright include: 

• You can post a copy of an article on your personal webpage - While many journals allow you to do this, some don't allow you to post your work to any website, including your own. 
• You can include the full-text version of the article in Digital Commons at Framingham State University - Again, some journals allow you to include the full-text version of your article and some do not. Some place restrictions on the version you can upload into a repository, allowing you to post the initial version you submitted to the journal but not the final, edited version. Some enforce an embargo period during which time they retain exclusive rights. The most up-to-date publisher policies can be found on the publisher's website and may differ from language in the author agreement you signed. 
• You can safely use work you wrote in a class - Publishers may disallow you to use books, chapters, papers, data sets and even illustrations that you have created in your class.

Aditionally, publisher policies may limit the future reuse of your work in channels that are not presently available. The following resources provide additional information on publisher policies pertaining to copyright. 

Scholars talk about the discoveries that open access publishing makes possible and why they support open access.