Open Access

Authors who are faced with a publication contract that seeks transfer of the copyright should not hesitate to negotiate new terms or at least to reserve rights to use their own work in future teaching and writing and publish their work in a repository or find a different publisher. There are resources that can help in making decisions about their copyrights. 

Resources: 

• The Authors Alliance: Promotes authorship for the "public good by supporting authors who write to be read." 
• Author Rights & the SPARC Author Addendum: SPARC promotes authors' rights and open access. SPARC's author addendum allow authors retain open access rights in their author agreement. 
• Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine: Creative Commons offers this addendum engine to assist authors in creating addenda to be included with publication agreements. These documents amend the publication agreement to allow authors to retain rights to use and share their work. 
• SHERPA/RoMEO: This project offers important insight into the language of publication agreements. 

There are many discipline-specific as well as multi-disciplinary open access journals. Choose journals for publication with care; see "Vetting OA journals" in this guide. 

Depositing works in an open access repository is a great way to openly share your research. Make sure to comply with copyright and licensing restrictions when submitting your work to a repository (see Your Copyright). A repository may be institutional, like TAMU-CC's Institutional Repository, or discipline-specific.

Data sharing is increasingly common and important, so much so that it is often mandated by funding agencies. There are many discipline-specific data repositories, many of which are open access. 

This guide was created using many resources, many of them are linked throughout the guide. This guide was also built using information from Cornell University Library guide on Open Access Publishing, published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.