Scholarly Impact: Copyright

Determining when you need to request permission to use copyrighted material.

• Copyright and Fair Use
  • The Stanford University Libraries maintain this site.
• Copyright Clearance Center
  • This non-profit center facilitates the licensing of copyrighted material by businesses, academic institutions, and organizations, and handles the payment of royalties to the copyright owners.
• Enabling and Developing Teaching Tools
  • This guide from the Columbia Copyright Advisory Office provides guidance for faculty on fair use in education and research, creating instructional materials, using film and video in a classroom, and MOOC production.

The following resources provide helpful advice on seeking and tracking permissions, including sample letters.

• University of Texas Copyright Crash Course: Getting Permission

Making your scholarship available to a wide audience is an important factor in scholarly impact. Make sure you retain the right to post your work to repositories including the BePress Legal Repository and the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Most law school affiliated journals will not have a problem with this as long as you also post the journal citation.

When you publish with a commercially produced journal rather than a law school journal, the rights you retain as the author will vary depending upon the publisher.

SHERPA/RoMEO

• A searchable database that includes summaries of publisher copyright and archiving policies.

SPARC Author Rights Resources

• Provides access to a brochure on author rights and an author addendum to help author's retain rights.

Author’s Rights, Tout de Suite / Charles W. Bailey, Jr. (2008)

• Introduces key aspects of author rights and links to additional resources.

Copyright Provisions in Law Journal Publication Agreements

• Benjamin J. Keele, Copyright Provisions in Law Journal Publication Agreements, 102 Law Libr. J. 269 (2010)

Safeguarding 'The Precious': Counsel on Law Journal Publication Agreements in Digital Times

• Michael N. Widener, Safeguarding the Precious: Counsel on Law Journal Publication Agreements in Digital Times, 28 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 217 (2010)

Keep Your Copyrights

• This site from Columbia University, Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, provides examples of good and bad author contracts and contract clauses.

Publisher Agreements/Author Rights Pages

Elsevier

• Provides their guidelines on sharing articles via repositories and other methods.

Taylor & Francis/Routledge

• Provides the publisher's position on copyright and author rights.

University of Chicago Press

• Offers the publisher's guidelines and an FAQ on journal author rights.

Duke Law Journal

• Author agreement used by the Duke Law Review.