Publishing contracts
Often in submitting your work for publication, you may be required to sign a publishing contract. It is important to read the contract carefully and consider what rights it is asking you to give to the publisher and how this will impact what you can do with your work in future. You are always free to negotiate terms of a publishing contract before you sign it.
Effect of assigning your work to a publisher
Sometimes publishing contracts will require you to transfer or “assign” your copyright to the publisher. An assignment to be legally effective must be in writing and signed by the person transferring copyright.
An example of the language used to “assign” your copyright is:
“The author hereby transfers, assigns, or otherwise conveys all copyright ownership, including any and all rights incidental thereto, exclusively to the publisher.”
Once you have assigned copyright to someone else you give up all of your copyright rights to that work (other than your personal moral rights) which limits your ability to make certain uses of the work. For example, you cannot print, distribute copies, post the work online or in your institution’s online research repository without permission from the publisher.
Moral rights, which are personal to the author of a work, can not be transferred to another person. Subject to some limitations, authors have the right to be identified (credited) in a clear and reasonably prominent way, when their work is used in certain situations. However, to be enforceable, you need to ensure that you “assert” your moral right to be identified as the author of the work. You can do this by specifying, in writing (preferably in an assignment, licence or commissioning agreement), that you wish to be named on copies of the work.
Retaining rights in works you publish
If you are publishing your work and that you would like to publish again in the future, then ensure you retain copyright ownership.
For example, you may want to publish a short story in a literary journal but you would also like to publish it in a book in the future. You can retain ownership by giving the publisher a non-exclusive licence to publish your work (so you are not prevented from publishing your work in the future). Alternatively, ensure you include wording in the agreement that gives you the specific right to publish the work in the future.
Other rights you may wish to reserve to yourself include:
- uploading the work to your personal website or blog;
- republishing the work in a subsequent book of your own;
- ensuring rights revert to you if the story is not published;
- the ability to make copies for distribution to students or colleagues, for example if you run creative writing classes;
- granting permission to others to use your work for specified purposes (such as non-profit or educational purposes).
Publisher prohibitions on publication of “prior versions”
If you intend to publish work which is based on or derived from an earlier work that has been published elsewhere, check that the chosen publisher does not prohibit publication of “prior versions”. If you are unsure about the publisher’s policy on prior versions, it is a good idea to ask the question.
Did you know you can store contracts and accompanying documents in
Catalogue?