Introduction to Rights Clearance and Staffing Issues
Rights Clearance
This section of the toolkit contains general information about rights clearance issues, but it is not designed to provide legal advice. Consult the legal team at your institution for answers to your questions.
You will use a variety of tools as you start to work on rights clearance. When you receive an item to deposit in the repository the first step is to determine if it has been published. If it is unpublished material, you may contact the author with information about creative commons licensing, and then proceed to deposit the item.
Depositing published material will involve more steps. First, you want to determine the copyright status of the work.
Published Journal Articles
Copyright transfer agreements
Make sure to ask the author if he or she kept a copy of the copyright transfer agreement. Only a few people might do this but it doesn't hurt to ask. Also ask if the author has signed an addendum. Trust the current publisher terms, even if you are adding an item that was published some time ago. Don't worry about finding a copyright transfer agreement from 1962 if you are adding an old article.
Sherpa/Romeo
Use Sherpa/RoMEO as a starting point when researching copyright for journal articles. This site should not be used as the final authority when deciding to include items in an institutional repository, but you will often be able to get a sense of a publisher's policy and follow links to the official copyright policy on a publisher's web page. Policies may be open to individual interpretation, usually a publisher will state if they object to articles being deposited in an IR, web site, or institutional server.
If you use Sherpa and are unable to find information about the journal your are researching, broaden your search by checking google, WorldCat, or your local library catalog. Try to locate the journal's home page on the web, ignoring hits from databases or vendors such as Jstor, Project Muse, Ingenta, etc.
Copyright issues can sometimes be difficult to untangle, and what one library decides to adopt as a policy might not work for other institutions.
For example, when depositing an article with multiple authors, some of whom are not affiliated with your institution, what would you do? Deposit it if the primary author gave his or her permission, or seek additional permission from the other authors before adding it to your repository? Questions like this are best answered by the General Counsel at your institution.
Finding Publisher Information
Often when you look at a publisher's page, the link labeled "copyright" or "permissions" will only contain guidelines for people who wish to use or reproduce the article. Look for information the publisher provides for perspective authors, as sometimes you can identify policies from author contracts. Look for links labeled "author permissions" or "author guidelines".
Set Phrases
Once you've determined the copyright status of the article you wish to deposit, look for any set phrases the publisher may require. Some publishers will require a link back to the publisher's web site.
Tips for Communicating With Faculty and Authors:
- One of the best ways to secure rights to an article is to ensure that the author doesn't sign away their rights at the time they submit the article for publication. They can submit an addendum to an existing contract from a publisher that would give them the right to archive their article in the IR.
- As you are talking to faculty and educating them about the IR, ask them to save their author's copy and/or preprint for depositing into the IR. Many publishers allow author's copies of articles to be deposited even if they don't allow the publisher's version to be archived.
- When faculty sign a contract for their work, it is useful if they send a copy of their article to the IR at the same time. The IR can easily embargo the article if needed and open access at the appropriate time.
Staffing Issues
Don't underestimate the time involved in rights research. Waiting for responses from publishers can slow the process of adding items to the repository. It is a good idea to have alternative projects to work on that don't require rights research.
If multiple people are researching copyright issues at the same time, try to reduce any research redundancy. Use the workflow database or some other method like an excel spreadsheet to save shared notes about work in progress or previous work.
TIP: As you begin to contact publishers to secure rights to place work in the IR, it might be useful to save a template of the letter or e-mail that you send on a shared network drive. That way, the next time you have to contact the same publisher about a different article or journal, you will already have an example of a letter in the format required.
