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Author rights retention

Retaining your rights

Rights retention in scholarly works ensures:

  1. Work is more visible and discoverable, leveraging existing investment in institutional repositories
  2. Authors or universities retain the right to make scholarly works open access and authors benefit from a potential citation advantage
  3. Increased compliance with institutional open access policies
  4. Improved researcher compliance with funder open access policies
  5. Clearer communication of reuse rights via consistent licensing

From the CAUL Intellectual property rights retention in scholarly works at Australian universities report, 2020.

To deposit a version of your work in Pure, Bond University's institutional repository, and make it openly accessible you must hold the copyright, or it must be a version allowed by the publisher to be made available in an institutional repository.

When you retain copyright

If you retain copyright, or the work is published under a Creative Commons licence, you can submit it to Pure.

If copyright is shared with other authors, check with them for approval of the work being archived and made available in the institutional repository.

Applying a Creative Commons licence to your work

When you publish in an Open Access journal, your work will most likely have a Creative Commons licence which is set by the journal. e.g. the Attribution Licence CC-BY.

A CC licence can also be applied to the Accepted version of the manuscript.

A CC licence gives the author copyright ownership over the work and allows the work to be reproduced and distributed under the provisions of the licence. There are six main licences to choose from and once a publication is available under a CC licence this will be replicated in the repository. Visit this Creative Commons website page for further licence examples.  

If you have created a work for an independent publication, say on a blog, the output and the blog can be licensed.

License your work

Please contact the Manager, Scholarly Publications & Copyright if you would like to discuss licensing your academic output.

Rights retention - letters and addendums

It is possible to negotiate with publishers to retain some or all of your publishing and open access rights. At the very least it is worthwhile trying to retain the right to self-archive a copy in an institutional repository by using a pre-submission letter, or an accompanying letter when submitting the manuscript. Alternatively, ask for an addendum to be added to the publishing agreement. 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 negotiate contract terms with publishers:

  • Plan S pre-submission letter. (Downloadable file available below.)
  • Plan S submission cover letter. (Downloadable file available below.)
  • SPARC Author Addendum
    The SPARC Author Addendum is a legal tool that amends the publisher's agreement allowing authors to keep articles key rights.
  • Science Commons:Scholar's Copyright Agreement
    An online form for authors to generate a PDF file to attach to a journal publisher's copyright agreement for retention of specific author rights.

Authorship and researcher ID

Establishing a unique research identity is an important step to improving your research visibility and impact. There are various options for creating a unique identity.

ORCID is a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers. It is well supported by publishers and is an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other current author ID schemes which include:

Author's rights