Skip to Main Content

Research publishing : where to publish

Publisher-Author copyright agreement
  • When you submit a work to a publisher, you need to sign a publishing agreement or also called an author license, contract, copyright transfer agreement or author agreement.
  • Publishing agreements vary between publishers and the type of publication e.g. a book, book chapter, journal article, conference paper.
  • If the publisher does not have a publishing agreement, the publisher can only publish the article for the purpose in which it was submitted. They would not be able to re-publish the article elsewhere without permission from the author.
  • Before you sign the agreement, read it carefully and make sure that you understand the publisher's conditions.
  • When an author assigns copyright to the publisher, he is granting all their rights as author and copyright owner to the publisher. If the author wants to do anything with the work in the future, they will need to seek permission from the publisher. 

Publishers' self archiving policy
  • In some agreements, the publisher may grant some rights back to the author like communicating, sharing or reusing the work.
  • Self archiving includes sharing the full text of a published or pre-publication works for free public use.
  • Authors provide access to preprints or post-prints (with publisher permission) and deposit their work in an institutional repositories e.g. UOB Institutional repository or disciplinary open archives, or other online publishing platforms such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate. 
  • Authors are required to review the publisher's self archiving policy before uploading their work for public use. Indeed many authors are posting illegally their articles in Academia or ResearchGate.

 

Search Sherpa/RoMEO tool to find out publishers' copyright policies and sef-archiving 

 

For example,  IEEE is a green publisher : 

  • Authors may post their version of an article as accepted for publication in an IEEE periodical or conference proceedings.
  • Posting of the final PDF, as published by IEEE Xplore®, continues to be prohibited, except for open-access journal articles supported by payment of an article processing charge (APC), whose authors may freely post the final version.