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Where Should I Publish My Research? : Author Rights and Responsibilities
Your Rights as an Author
If you are new to publishing, you may assume that you have the right to do whatever you want with your publication, e.g. send copies to anyone who asks for it. However, this may not be the case depending on the journal in which you publish.
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), explains the issue of author rights and provides tips on how you can ensure that you secure your rights as an author as fully as possible. An addendum that can be attached to publication agreements tailored for US authors is available on the site.
Know Your Rights as the Author
- The author is the copyright holder. As the author of a work you are the copyright holder unless and until you transfer the copyright to someone else in a signed agreement.
- Assigning your rights matters. Normally, the copyright holder possesses the exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, public performance, public display, and modification of the original work. An author who has transferred copyright without retaining these rights must ask permission unless the use is one of the statutory exemptions in copyright law.
- The copyright holder controls the work. Decisions concerning use of the work, such as distribution, access, pricing, updates, and any use restrictions belong to the copyright holder. Authors who have transferred their copyright without retaining any rights may not be able to place the work on course Web sites, copy it for students or colleagues, deposit the work in a public online archive, or reuse portions in a subsequent work. That’s why it is important to retain the rights you need.
- Transferring copyright doesn’t have to be all or nothing. The law allows you to transfer copyright while holding back rights for yourself and others. This is the compromise that the SPARC Author Addendum helps you to achieve.
"Author Rights: Using the SPARC Author Addendum" by SPARC is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Will My Work End Up Training AI?
As of late 2024, several academic publishers have entered into formal agreements with generative AI companies, licensing their published content for use in training large language models (LLMs).
What Does This Mean for Authors?
- Publishers are increasingly monetizing their collections by selling access to their content for AI training. This practice raises important questions about authorship rights, ethical considerations, and the transparency of these deals. While Cambridge University Press is seeking author opt-in, other publishers have not sought input.
- If your work is online, it may already be in AI training data. Many LLMs have been trained on publicly available online content, including open-access papers, preprints, and even paywalled materials that have been scraped. If your work—or parts of it, like an abstract—is accessible online, it is reasonable to assume it could already be part of these datasets.
- While the inclusion of your work in AI training could arguably increase the visibility of your scholarship, as AI models trained on high-quality research may cite or highlight your findings in generated content, there are a number of significant concerns:
- Your work may be used without your express consent, raising ethical questions about intellectual property and authorship rights.
- Models trained on your research could misrepresent or oversimplify your findings
- You may receive no financial compensation or recognition, even if your work contributes significantly to a model's capabilities.
What Should You Do?
- Check publisher policies: Before submitting your paper, review the publisher’s policies regarding AI licensing and training datasets. Some publishers now include explicit clauses about AI usage in their terms of publication.
- Understand consent processes: Look for clear statements about whether you have the option to opt in or out of having your work included in AI training datasets.
- Ask questions about your publishing contract: Can you negotiate language using tools like the Model Publishing Contract for Digital Scholarship or the Authors Guild model clause for prohibiting AI training without express permission.While academic publishers may express unwillingness to incorporate that language, it is worth asking.
- Stay informed: The landscape is evolving quickly. Regularly check resources like Ithaka S+R’s Generative AI Licensing Agreement Tracker to stay updated on publisher practices and the broader implications for scholarly communication.
- Generative AI Licensing Agreement TrackerTracks licensing deals between publishers and AI companies, including details on the scope and impact of these agreements.
- AI and the Struggle for Control Over Research (Inside Higher Ed, January 2025)For those feeling queasy about academic publishers’ AI deals, Günter Waibel and Dave Hansen argue the way forward is not more restrictive licenses—it’s open access.
- Has your paper been used to train an AI model? Almost certainly. (Nature, August 2024))Examines how AI training practices are reshaping scholarly publishing.
- Publishers are selling papers to train AIs — and making millions of dollars (Nature, December 2024)Investigates the financial incentives driving publishers’ participation in AI training markets.
- Tracking the Licensing of Scholarly Content to LLMsProvides basic context for the strategy and possible publisher benefit derived from these agreements.
- Large Language Publishing: The Scholarly Publishing Oligopoly’s Bet on AI"The AI hype cycle has come for scholarly publishing. This essay argues that the industry’s feverishーif mostly aspirationalーembrace of artificial intelligence should be read as the latest installment of an ongoing campaign. Led by Elsevier, commercial publishers have, for about a decade, layered a second business on top of their legacy publishing operations. That business is to mine and process scholars’ works and behavior into prediction products, sold back to universities and research agencies. This article focuses on an offshoot of the big firms’ surveillance-publishing businesses: the post-ChatGPT imperative to profit from troves of proprietary “training data,” to make new AI products andーthe essay predictsーto license academic papers and scholars’ tracked behavior to big technology companies."
Preventing and Addressing Authorship Issues
Authorship and contribution to a publication can be a complicated (and potentially uncomfortable) political and logistical process. These resources can help you discuss and plan how to provide appropriate credit for contributions as you prepare to publish, as well as practices to avoid.
- Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT)Discuss and agree with your collaborators and team members what have been your contributions to planned research outputs (according to the CRediT standard). This can be useful throughout the research process and particularly when preparing to publish your work.
- Authorship Discussion Document (COPE)Authorship can refer to individuals or groups that create an idea or develop the publication that disseminates that intellectual or creative work; however, appropriately acknowledging roles and contributions is not always a simple task. Journals are encouraged to provide clear, transparent guidance and policies for authors on providing authorship credentials, while authors must be responsible for adhering to such policies and discipline-specific guidelines. Questions over a range of issues relating to authorship may arise at any point from submission to post-publication, and journals should have policies and processes in place for handling this range of circumstances. COPE provides key information resources for authors, core policy guidance for editors, notes on the scope of submission guidelines, resources for managing pre- and post-publication authorship disputes, guidance for institutions to manage and support authorship integrity.
- How to Handle Authorship Disputes: A Guide for New Researchers (COPE)Guidance for new researchers on good authorship practice, and advice on how to deal with authorship issues as they arise.
- How to Recognise Potential Authorship Problems (COPE)The infographic highlights warning signs of inappropriate authorship which could indicate an incomplete author list or an author being added who does not fulfil the authorship criteria used. The guidance describes ghost, guest, and gift authorship and best practice to minimise authorship problems.
Attribution
Content in this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and is adapted from "Identifying Appropriate Journals for Publication" by University of Alberta Health Sciences Library which is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0