UPDATE (5/20/26 @ 7:30am AZ time):
The GCU Library's updated version of LopeCat, the library’s online catalog, is live! For more details on what has changed, visit the What's New Guide .
Publishing Resources: Author Rights
Author Rights - Understanding the SPARC Author Addendum
Finding Publisher Policies
You can also search Cabells Scholarly Analytics or the SHERPA/RoMEO database to locate specific information about copyright transfer by searching for the journal title.
For information on their journal selection policy and process, visit "Journal Selection Policy" at the top of Cabells under " Our Process " and select " Journal Selection ."
Directories of publishing opportunities in business, computer science, education, health and nursing, psychology and sciences. Assists researchers with locating publications that may be a good fit for manuscript publication by providing information on over 4,000 journals that includes addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and websites as well as links to guidelines, submission information, and a description of the review process used for each journal.
Analyzes 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.
Negotiating Your Author Rights
You may not realize when you quickly accept the contract and check the boxes on the provided standard agreement from a publisher that you are giving up many of your rights to your own content. Before quickly checking the boxes, review the contract details and ask for changes or amendments. Your contract with the publisher is negotiable! This is an important step to be able to retain your rights to your work for sharing in the classroom, future work based on the publication, or even posting the work on your personal or scholarly website.
Consider the following options, when reviewing a publisher's agreement:
- Transfer all your rights to the publisher.
- Transfer the copyright but retain some of your rights.
- Retain all of your rights and license the rights to the publisher.
Review the resources below to assist you with negotiating and adding an author addendum to any publisher contract prior to signing.
Author Addendums
Consider using one of the additions or addendums below when negotiating your publishing contract:
