Copyright Authors

Author's Rights

Open access orange lock

Digital distribution and changes in the law are transforming the way that scholars share their work. The CDSC offers legal guidance to help you understand the issues and to support your publication decisions. We have more information about the challenges in the current publication environment.

We also offer more information about publication agreements, the central legal instrument in the academic world.

Protect Your Rights and Promote Your Work

Protect your right to use your own work

The CDSC provides tools and expertise that can help you negotiate the legal and policy issues surrounding your publication decisions. The SPARC addendum can be added to any contract to retain specific rights. You can also schedule a consultation to review your publication agreement and consider specific language to address your needs as an author.

Help your work be read and cited more often

Many authors also choose to make their work available without restriction by making it "open access" (OA). Although OA is a relatively new practice a scholarly consensus is already developing that OA publication has a readership and citation advantage. If you are interested in making your scholarship open access you can review these tools or schedule a consultation to discuss OA publication options.

Help you negotiate ownership issues surrounding joint authorship, faculty-student collaboration, and institutional shop rights

The CDSC is here to help you understand rights issues and to adjudicate disputes about ownership. If you are just beginning a collaborative project you may wish to consult NCSU's policy on ownership. If you have questions about ownership at any point you can also contact the CDSC.

Read more about publishing in the Publishing at NCSU FAQ.

NIH Compliance

"The National Institute of Health (NIH) is committed to ensuring that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication. To help advance science and improve human health, the Policy requires that these papers are accessible to the public on PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication."

Does This Policy Apply to You?

This Policy applies to you if your peer-reviewed article is based on research that meets one or more of the following categories:

Research directly funded in any part by an NIH grant or cooperative agreement active in Fiscal Year 2008 (October 1, 2007- September 30, 2008) or beyond;
Research directly funded in any part by a contract signed on or after April 7, 2008;
Research directly funded in any part by the NIH Intramural Program;
NIH pays your salary.

Support for NIH scholars

The CDSC is also here to help you with NIH compliance. Many funding sources such as the NIH have specific requirements. We can help you understand what is expected of you, negotiate the paperwork and make your work openly available as required for funding.