Faculty Senate Endorses Author's Addendum

Do you have a legal right to post copies of your previously published work on your Website? Your right to do so will depend on the contract you signed with a publisher for your work. The Faculty Senate encourages academic authors to append a special Authors’ Addendum to contracts signed with publishers. Use of the addendum is intended “to ensure that academic authors retain certain intellectual property rights that facilitate archiving, instructional use, and sharing with colleagues to advance discourse and discovery.”

The addendum is available online.

Complete the Addendum online, print and sign it, or print or save a blank copy for later use. The UW Author's Addendum is a variation on a similar document endorsed by the CIC Provosts earlier this year.

But what about contracts you may have signed in the past? While the actual contract is the definitive document that determines your rights, a Website called “SHERPA/RoMEO” is an excellent source of information about the terms of different publishers’ standard contracts. You can consult it to determine the rights you (probably) have to items you previously published, or to find out more about the standard contract terms of journals where you are considering submitting your work for publication.

Additional information:

Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing, UW-Madison Library System

Your Liaison Librarian can also help with resources and information related to scholarly publishing and archiving, including information about using the university's digital archive, MINDS@UW.

With thanks to librarian, Bev P, for this blog post.