Jennifer McLennan, Director of Communications, SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and Faye Chadwell, Associate University Librarian for Collections and Content Management, Oregon State University, shared with the audience the importance of authors being aware of their rights when they publish their work.

According to McLennan and Chadwell, managing author’s rights is a key component to transforming scholarly communication. The most common practice among scholars is to sign the copyright agreements without questioning anything. Besides being able to challenge the content of these contracts, scholars also should be aware that they can and should amend the copyright transfer agreements in order to protect their rights.

In order to help librarians learn more about publisher copyright transfer agreements several examples of agreements were distributed among the participants. The overall conclusion reached after reading these examples was that the language in these contracts is very vague and, in many cases, transfers an almost total control over to the publisher.

They also shared some tools that librarians can use in order to educate faculty on campus about transferring the ownership of their intellectual output.

Reported by Germano Streese