University Libraries: Scholarly Communication: Manuscript Versions and Author Rights

Negotiating Author Rights

Authors are automatically granted exclusive rights to their creative works but often give away those rights when they sign publication agreements. This loss of copyright can prevent authors from sharing their work in institutional repositories and even from publicly displaying their work or distributing it in class. In addition, while authors are often stripped of their ownership, publishers are granted more rights, including the ability to reuse authors' works without permission or notice.

SPARC, in coordination with the Creative Commons and Science Commons, developed an author addendum that modifies and supplements publisher agreement and allows authors to maintain their rights, including the acknowledgment of prior license grants. Authors may use the addendum as is or they may select certain individual rights to include or exclude.

About Joint Authors: Co-authors are granted joint and equal ownership of a work. This means that all authors may exercise any or all of the exclusive rights granted to them by copyright law. In addition, all authors may grant third parties permission to use the work without co-authors’ consent and/or transfer their copyright to a third party without their co-authors' consent.

Manuscript Versions and Rights

Explaining Manuscript Versions in Manuscript detectives - submitted, accepted, or published? by Arthur Smith is licensed under CC By 4.0.

Version of Article	Explanation
Author’s Original Manuscript / Working Paper / Submitted Manuscript / Pre-print	This is the first version sent to a journal for consideration, before any formal peer-review has been conducted. Authors hold rights to this version of the manuscript.
Accepted Manuscript / Post-print	This is the manuscript draft, after peer review and changes by the author(s) but before publisher info such as pagination or logos have been added. It often includes numbers beside each line of text. Authors hold rights to this version of the manuscript.
Galley Proofs/Pre-Proofs	This version of the manuscript is the final manuscript version before the publication version. It provides authors the opportunity to make final revisions before publication. Authors are not usually allowed to publish this version of the manuscript.
Version of record / Publisher’s Version	This is the published version of a manuscript. It includes typesetting and journal branding and often also includes a DOI (digital object identifier).

Open Policy Finder
Open Policy Finder aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of self-archiving permissions and conditions of rights given to authors on a journal-by-journal basis. Users may search by journal title, ISSN, or publisher name.
Pre-prints, post-prints, and publisher's PDF explained
It can be difficult to understand your rights and choose the appropriate version of your work to share. This guide outlines the various versions of your article, how to find them, and when you can share them.

Ten simple rules to consider regarding preprint submission
Preprints are research output that has not completed a typical publication pipeline but is of value to the community and deserving of being easily discovered and accessed. This brief article explains ten rules for scientists to consider before using preprints as a communication mechanism.