Author Rights – Using the SPARC Author Addendum
The SPARC Author Addendum is a legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement and allows you to keep key rights to your articles. The Author Addendum is a free resource developed by SPARC in partnership with Creative Commons and Science Commons, established non-profit organizations that offer a range of copyright options for many different creative endeavours.
Why do we need this? In 1999, Phil Agre wrote in his Red Rock Eater news service, “The job of an academic publisher is to take my work for $0,* add almost no value to it, and sell it to my library for way too much money.” Agre’s solution to protecting his right to make his work more freely available was as follows. “So whenever I get one of those form contracts from a journal publisher, I always get out a pen and edit it. Mostly I write in the margin, ‘I reserve the right to post the paper on my Web site’.”
Today, writers and researchers are much more aware about their authorship rights, and are much more likely to self-publish on their own webpages or other online venues to make their work more widely available. The SPARC Author Addendum is a good measure for those wanting to also publish in commercial academic journals.
Click here to go to the SPARC website.
Click here to download the SPARC Author Addendum.
* To put this into perspective, a couple of years earlier in 1995, Andrew Odlyzko had done some work estimating the implicit costs of producing a typical mathematical paper. His calculations first include the salary and infrastructure support of a particular academic (assigning one-third of these costs to research activities, 20,000 USD); the time and expertise contributed by editors and expert reviewers in correspondence and revisions (4,000 USD), and by reviewers preparing reviews and locating sources (1,000 USD) for each published paper.
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