Protecting Intellectual Property
Awareness concerning intellectual property rights is an increasingly important issue for faculty and researchers. This is perhaps most profoundly felt
in academia in regards to publishing and disseminating research. Managing one's intellectual output through the transferal and retention of copyrights is a key
to reshaping scholarly communication. It is important for faculty to know how to balance their interests and the academy's interests with the interests of
publishers.
The transfer of copyrights can confer advantages to publishers, perhaps to the author's and the institution's disadvantage. By managing the rights
one retains and those one transfers, faculty can maximize the dissemination, use, and impact of their work.
Scholarly Communication
Satisfy Your Copyright Needs and Protect Your Intellectual Property
What You Can Do to Protect your Intellectual Property
As faculty and researchers you have enormous influence as authors and editors. Here's a list of some things you can do to maximize the reach and impact
of your research, reduce access barriers, retain control and protection of your scholarship and intellectual property.
- Manage your intellectual property: Increase your freedom and flexibility to use your
work for teaching, learning, and research. Reserve some or all rights to copy or republish, and transfer only those rights to the publisher that they need
to conduct their business.
- Use alternative, and when allowable, multiple forms of publishing
- Open Access Journals: New modes of scholarly publication have been developed and are being developed. There are now more
than 1,000 open access journals that are focused on increasing dissemination and are experimenting with new business models -- see the directory of open access journals.
- Deposit of digital research results into online research repositories. Disciplinary communities and institutions have created
online repositories for research results. Many departments on the University of Texas campus have their own.
- Publishers who are experimenting with alternatives. Browse through University of California's Office of Scholarly Cummunications's news and issues
to see announcements about experiments from a variety of other publishers.
- Competitors to commercially published journals. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) exists to
foster such competition. View a list of some SPARC-supported journals currently in
publication.
- Support sustainable scholarly communication: Consider submitting papers to quality
journals that have reasonable pricing practices; examine the pricing, copyright, and licensing agreements of any commercially published journal you
contribute to; or refuse to review for unreasonably expensive journals or to serve on their editorial boards.
