The Association of College and Research Libraries has an excellent
model for an author's agreement, in my opinion. In two paragraphs,
the rights of the publisher (for first publication) and author
(retains all other rights) are made clear.
The agreement can be downloaded from:
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crlnews/collegeresearch.htm
Look for: Author's Agreement
I recommend this agreement as a model for either OA or subscription-
based publishers, because of the support for authors' rights, but
also because of the clarity and brevity.
I have seen other agreements which are very long and make it very
difficult to figure out the rights, both for the author and for the
publishers' representatives. It has happened, in my experience, that
different representatives of the same publisher, referring to the
same agreement, have come to different conclusions about the rights
they offer to authors for self-archiving.
If authors have been signing away their copyright, for many, it may
have been simply because they do not have time to go through the
legalese.
Heather Morrison
Received on Wed Feb 21 2007 - 21:02:50 GMT