Managing Your Intellectual Property
Many journal require authors to assign copyright for published work to the publisher. This limits the author's ability to share the work in other formats and other venues, thus limiting dissemination of and access to it. It also means UCLA is paying for the work twice: in the case of authors on faculty or staff or students on scholarship, the university initially pays for the creation of the research or scholarship, then the Library pays for a subscription to the journal.
But you have options. You can negotiate the copyright terms with the publisher and are often able to assign the publisher a limited copyright, then disseminate the work in other ways. If you serve on the editorial board of a journal or are a member of a scholarly society that publishes a journal, you can encourage the managers to accept and promote flexible copyright agreements.
You should strongly consider publishing in what are called "open-access" journals. These peer-reviewed publications charge no subscription fees and thus are free to all users; some charge a modest fee to underwrite their expenses, which can be covered by grant funding or in some cases by the Library. There are also a number of preprint and postprint repositories, such as the UC eScholarship Repository, that charge no fee to authors or users and are free of access restrictions as well
The links below provide more information on how to control your copyright and negotiate terms with publishers and on open-access journals and pre- and postprint repositories. Intellectual property specialists on the Library staff can assist you; contact information is available below.
