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Getting Published

tips and resources for navigating the process of academic publishing

Retain your Copyright

According to the law, copyright is granted to authors upon expressing their ideas in a "tangible form", even if it is an unpublished manuscript; no registration is needed to become the legitimate copyright holder of your own work. As the author, you have the exclusive right to copy, distributed or perform your work, unless you give your permission to others to do so. In fact, in order to publish your article, all the publisher needs is your permission, yet standard publisher agreements transfer all your rights to the publisher. You don't have to accept it, as the owner of your own intellectual property.

We've created this Negotiating Guide to help you negotiate with your publisher and retain some of your rights. It takes you step by step through a typical negotiating process using clear, everyday language. Alternatively, you may want to attach an addendum that reserves rights essential to scholars in the university environment. This is a rider to the contract that is designed to ensure that the author, her colleagues, and her institution, are able to use and archive the scholarly work. The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine can easily generate a customized addendum to meet your needs.

Open Access

You may also choose to publish your article in an Open Access journal. Many Open Access journals are peer-reviewed and have excellent impact factors. They feature scholarly literature in electronic format, free of charge to the user and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. That means that users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, as long as they "give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited," according to the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Your consent, as the author and copyright holder, is needed to publish your work in the public domain, but you retain the right to block the distribution of mangled or misattributed copies. This is how you can maintain control over your own work.

For more information, see the OA Publishing - Gold Library Guide

Quicklinks for Authors

The ASU Library acknowledges the twenty-three Native Nations that have inhabited this land for centuries. Arizona State University's four campuses are located in the Salt River Valley on ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples, including the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) Indian Communities, whose care and keeping of these lands allows us to be here today. ASU Library acknowledges the sovereignty of these nations and seeks to foster an environment of success and possibility for Native American students and patrons. We are advocates for the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge systems and research methodologies within contemporary library practice. ASU Library welcomes members of the Akimel O’odham and Pee Posh, and all Native nations to the Library.