Fortunately, you are not alone. Other professionals in research institutions acknowledge that the crisis in scholarly communication is severe enough to develop new dissemination tools for the academic community. There are a number of steps you can take that will help keep scholarly communication vital and ensure that your work is freely available for educational use at your institution .
Retain your Copyright
According to the law, copyright is granted to authors upon expressing their ideas in a "tangible form", even if it is an unpublished manuscript; no registration is needed to become the legitimate copyright holder of your own work. As the author, you have the exclusive right to copy, distributed or perform your work, unless you give your permission to others to do so. In fact, in order to publish your article, all the publisher needs is your permission, yet standard publisher agreements transfer all your rights from you to the publisher. You don't have to accept it, as the owner of your own intellectual property.
ASU Libraries, together with a contract specialist, offer you a toolkit to negotiate with your publisher and retain some of your rights. The Negotiating Guide takes you step by step through a typical negotiating process using clear, everyday language. It also includes a sample contract that you can copy, distribute and submit to publishers. If a publisher insists on its contract rather than accepting the sample contract above, you may want to attach an addendum that reserves rights essential to scholars in the university environment. This is a rider to the contract that is designed to ensure that the author, her colleagues, and her institution, are able to use and archive the scholarly work. Other examples of alternative agreements are available under Resources.
Open Access Journals
You may also choose to publish your article in an Open Access journal. Many Open Access journals are peer-reviewed and have excellent impact factors. They feature scholarly literature in electronic format, free of charge to the user and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. That means that users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, as long as they "give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited," according to the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Nevertheless, the Open Access movement does not stand for "Napster for Science". Your consent, as the author and copyright holder, is needed to publish your work in the public domain, but you retain the right to block the distribution of mangled or misattributed copies. This is how you can maintain control over your own work.
This publishing project is a compelling alternative to traditional publishing options, in which faculty members like you donate your time in writing, reviewing and editing, and still find out that their institutions have to pay ever-increasing fees for accessing works they supported with their own research and institutional funds.
You may not be aware that some of the major journals in your discipline are Open Access. The Directory of Open Access Journals, in the Resources section, can help you identifying them
Self-Archiving
Another option is to archive your research in a disciplinary or intuitional digital repository. Such repositories are harvested by search engines such as Google or Ask and made freely accessible to potential readers. Authors may choose to put an un-refereed preprint into the archive, before they submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. If after submission the article is accepted, and the author retains the right to self-archive, then the refereed or revised postprint may be archived. But even if the publisher does not allow self-archiving, authors can still archive the "corrigenda" (an online preprint vs. the published version of the article).
ASU Libraries plans on establishing an institutional repository soon.
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