Publish Your Research

When an author and a publisher agree that the publisher will publish the author's work, the author signs the publisher contract. The contract will specify which, if any, rights the author retains, and which rights are transferred to the publisher. Options that may appear in a contract include:

• The author transfer full copyright to the publisher. In this case the rights of the original author are no different that the rights of any other reader of the article or book. Reuse of the work is still possible within the terms of the United States Fair Use doctrine. 
• The author transfers full copyright to the publisher, but retains the right to use copies of the work in teaching, or share it with colleagues.
• The author transfers full copyright to the publisher, but retains the right to reuse the work, or parts of the work such as figures, in future publications.
• The author transfers full copyright to the publisher, but retains the right to deposit a postprint of the article (identical to the published article but without the publisher formatting) to an open repository or display it on the author's website.
• The author retains copyright and grants the publisher either an exclusive license to publish or a non-exclusive license to publish.
• The author retains copyright using one of the Creative Commons Licenses.

For more information see the Authors Alliance information Publishing Contracts

The international nonprofit Creative Commons organization offers six different standard licenses that allow authors to specify what others can do with their articles, books, and other scholarly and creative works .

Two of the most common are:

• CC BY: Free to Read and Free to Reuse any portion for any purpose. Must cite authors.
• CC BY-NC-ND: Free to Read. Free to Reuse but only in unadapted form, and for non-commercial purposes only. Must cite authors.

For more information see About CC Licenses from Creative Commons.

The Open Source Initiative maintains a database of approved licenses for a variety of software products. Open Source Initiative Licenses

Article-based dissertations contain copies of articles that have been, or will be, published as journal articles. This practice is not a violation of copyright licenses in most cases. Journals often have a statement in their Instructions to Authors. For example, here is the statement from Cell:  "Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or a published lecture or academic thesis)..." https://www.cell.com/cell/authors 

For an in-depth discussion of authors re-use of text from one of their articles in another of their own articles, see Moskovitz, C. (2021), Standardizing terminology for text recycling in research writing. Learned Publishing, 34: 370-378. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1372

For guidance in STEM fields see "How to Be Transparent about Text Recycling" from the Text Recycling Research Project https://textrecycling.org/how-to-be-transparent-about-text-recycling/