Q. What is an author or publishing agreement?

When you submit a journal article, book or book chapter to a publisher, you will be asked to sign a publishing agreement. The agreement may also be called an author licence, contract, copyright transfer agreement or author agreement.

Copyright implications

Before you sign the agreement, read it carefully and ensure you understand licence or contract conditions that could limit your copyrights. For example, the agreement may impact on your ability to legally share, communicate or reuse your work, and could interfere with grant funding requirements. Search Sherpa Romeo for an overview of your journal's copyright and Open Access policies.

It is possible to negotiate with publishers if you are unhappy with some clauses. You may be particularly interested in negotiating:

• the right to deposit the author accepted manuscript in ResearchOnline@JCU, and the length of the embargo period before the work can be made Open Access
• the right to reuse your figures, tables and images for learning and teaching purposes
• the right to reuse your figures, tables and images on a website or in future outputs and presentations

To aid publishing agreement negotiations, follow Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine simple instructions and generate a .PDF form outlining rights that you wish to retain. Attach this form to the publishing agreement and return both to the publisher. Please note, some publishers will be more willing than others to modify their publishing agreement.

Creative Commons

Some publishing agreements may require you to apply a Creative Commons licence to your work. This is typically the case if your work is to be published as Open Access.