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