Publishing
When publishing, faculty and students need to pay special attention to the rights they have in their publications and the rights they are signing over to a publisher. Granting agencies, notably the NIH, may have requirements about when and how publications related to grant-funded research must be made available, and these requirements may limit the publication agreements you can sign. Faculty need to be thoughtful about how they wish to reuse their research in classrooms and with colleagues, and ensure that, in working with publishers, they retain the rights they need to enable that collaboration.
The rise of the Open Access movement, which aims to make research available online--free of charge, and of most copyright and licensing restrictions--has resulted in authors of scholarly works having a much wider array of licensing options now than in the past. For some authors or publishers, the traditional approach of assigning copyright in an article or book to a publisher may be appropriate. Other options include:
- Granting the publisher a license to publish your work, while you retain copyright
- Publishing in open access journals
- Assigning copyright to a journal, with a license back from the journal to the author enabling the author to do one or more of the following:
- Post on an institutional website in a PDF format
- Make derivative works
- Make copies for educational purposes
- Allow others to make copies for educational purposes
- Allow the same rights for Stanford or the originating institution
Stanford generally doesn't mandate a copyright position for its community members who publish articles or books, although the School of Education has an Open Access Initiative.
More detailed information on rights issues, and recommendations for working with publishers, can be found here:
Special note regarding NIH-supported research
In 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) implemented a Public Access Policy which requires that a digital copy of all research publications supported by NIH funding be submitted to PubMed Central, an online public repository, within 12 months of the original publication. The NIH website offers more information about this policy.
