Open Access and Scholarly Publishing

An author's addendum is a legal document that modifies the publisher's agreement and allows authors to keep rights to their work. Listed below are some free resources which can help authors negotiating contract terms with publishers:

• SPARC Author Addendum
  The SPARC Author Addendum is a legal tool that amends the publisher's agreement allowing authors to keep articles key rights.
• The JISC Author's Licence
  his toolbox has been compiled to enable the author and the publisher to provide a publishing agreement and to identify the issues that should be considered when a scholarly work is submitted to a journal.
• Science Commons:Scholar's Copyright Agreement
  This is an online form which helps authors to generate a PDF file that can be attached to a journal publisher's copyright agreement to retain specific author rights.

Establishing a unique author/researcher identity is an important step to improving your research visibility and impact. There are a variety of options for creating a unique identity, with ORCID being the latest development.  ORCID is well supported by many publishers.

ORCID is a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers and an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other current author ID schemes which includes:

• Researcher ID - linked to Thomson Reuter's Web of Knowledge platform
• My Citations - Google Scholar
• Author identifier - Scopus

  SPARC provides useful information about author rights.

  Check SPARC Author Addendum for better understanding
  of OA authorship.

  This diagram outlines author's right in OA environment.
  easel.ly

SPARC have released this two-minute video to help authors on the topic of author rights.  The video explains in simple terms the potential for wider exposure of scholarly articles when authors retain key rights.