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Milner Library

Academic Writing

This guide provides guidance, tips, and examples about different types of academic writing like literature reviews, annotated bibliographies, and abstract writing.

Publication Goals in Copyright

What does that mean, 'Publication Goals in Copyright'?

Obvious goals are desires such as having your work published, fulfilling components to gain tenure and promotion, and of course, scholarly recognition. 

But publishers have come to realize authors have other requirements and thus offer differing copyright options to meet those needs.

As you search for a publisher, consider the publisher copyright requirements through these choices:
(from Columbia Law School):

  • Non-commercial
    • Free distribution--you really want anyone to have access to your work and you aren't too concerned about payment.  For an author to achieve this open access goal, you pay the publisher.
      • You can license your work through 1 of the differing types of Creative Commons licenses
      • Why think about a license?  From CC: the license allows a creator to "retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work — at least non-commercially".
    • Intermediary Distributors--usual for academics.  You need exposure and help so work through a distributor, a publisher. You may or may not receive payment.  While some publishers always require full transfer of the author's copyright to the publisher, others will negotiate. 
  • Commercial
    • Income from your work is important and thus you wish to be paid for allowing access.  Likely you will need to negotiate with commercial distributors--whose goals (may) differ from yours.

What is Copyright?

What is Copyright?

Copyright is legal protection for content creators.  It falls under the legal umbrella of Intellectual Property.

Intellectual Property is the Fruit of your mental labor, the creations of the human mind.  It can not be transferred or taken away. 

There are 2 subdivisions:

  1. Industrial Property--new solutions to technical problems
    1. This includes patents and trademarks
  2. Copyright
    1. The form of expression of ideas AND the fixation of that form in some sort of medium.

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