Open Access for NJIT Authors

• Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine

  This tool helps you generate a PDF form that can be attached to a publisher's copyright agreement to help preserve your rights.

• Sherpa Romeo

  This website helps you look up publishers and journals to see what their policies are with regards to repositories, copyright, etc.

• Author Rights: Using the SPARC Author Addendum

  This page supplies guidance in the use of the SPARC addendum to copyright agreements to maintain rights to your work.

• Rights Reversion Portal

  Provided by the Authors Alliance, this site provides guidance for the process of rights reversion, i.e. gaining the rights to your works back from publishers. The tools and resources are designed to help authors take control of their copyrights and make their works newly available.

• Association of University Presses Permissions FAQ

  Information in copyright and permissions from the the Association of University Presses.

• ARL: Author Rights

  A discussion of copyright and author rights retention from the Association of Research Libraries.

• The Librarian's Copyright Companion

  This book provides practical analysis of copyright law from a librarian's perspective, and is a useful work for other academic audiences as well. In addition to covering how to share works legally, it details topics such as Creative Commons and the use of digital video in the classroom.

• Shareyourpaper.org (BETA)

  From the creators of the Open Access Button, Shareyourpaper.org allows authors to search for their works by DOI and determine the best legal method for sharing that work openly.

Many publishers’ agreements will ask you to surrender more of your rights than are necessary for publication. Depending on the agreement, you may find yourself unable to re-use portions of your articles in other publications, or even prevented from printing your writings for your own classes.

Luckily, the library has experts who can help you navigate these agreements and maintain more control of your works. This guide will help you to:

• understand your rights as an author;

• analyze publisher agreements; and

• navigate the publication process so that you end up with more control over your works.

Two options that are often presented to scholarly authors to distribute your works openly are Academia.edu and ResearchGate. It's important to remember that unlike open access repositories, both of these are commercial enterprises (despite the former's top-level domain). That means they're in the business of selling things, including your user data. Please be cautious with utilizing such systems, and consider using open access repositories instead!

For a quick but thorough run-down of the issue, we recommend One more word about ResearchGate/Academia.edu and Choosing and using academic sharing and networking platforms.