Your Rights and Responsibilities as an Author
In connection with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy, the agency stresses that it is your responsibility, as the author, to ensure that you have the right to deposit your manuscript with PubMed Central (PMC). Some publishers may require that you transfer copyright prior to acceptance of a publication. The NIH cautions that such journals should be avoided if their contract prevents you from depositing articles in PMC.
Other publishers in their publication agreements may insist that they will own all the rights and even ask you to warrant that there are no prior agreements concerning the publication. Any manuscript submitted to PMC prior to signing this type of agreement will cause you to be in breach of the agreement and in violation of NIH policy.
If the publisher does not participate in PMC there are three approaches you can follow to be in compliance:
First, you should read your publication agreement carefully and seek assistance if you are not certain that you have the right to deposit your article with PMC.
Second, the following language should be added to each publication agreement in which you have any questions regarding your rights: "The Journal acknowledges that Author retains the right to provide a copy of the final manuscript covered by this Agreement to the NIH upon acceptance of the manuscript for Journal publication for public archiving in PubMed Central as soon as possible, but in no case, later than 12 months following publication by Journal."
Finally, you may attach the Scholar's Copyright Delayed Access Addendum to the publication contract. The Addendum is a legal instrument that acknowledges any prior grants, including those required by funding agencies. It also provides you with other important rights, including the right to use your article in your own teaching and research, the right to build on the article in future publications, and the right to deposit the PDF version from the publisher with PMC. An online engine that generates the Addendum is found at http://scholars.sciencecommons.org/. Note that the engine currently creates an agreement with a six month delay; this can be changed manually if the journal insists on PMC delaying access for the full twelve months.
Additional information about the publication policy of many journals regarding the required PMC deposit is available at the SHERPA/RoMEO site, which may be found at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk.romeo.php. This site may be used to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement.
Maintained by webmaster@wpi.eduLast modified: June 10, 2008 13:46:11