LibGuides: Open Access Publishing: Authorship and Author Rights

Author Rights

A key principle of the Open Access is recognizing that authors retain rights to the work they create. When publishing in an OA journal, authors typically maintain full ownership of their articles.

These rights often include:

The ability to reproduce, share, publicly perform, and display the article in any format for non-commercial purposes.
The right to create derivative works based on the original article.
The authority to permit others to use the article for non-commercial purposes, provided proper credit is given to the author and the original journal is cited as the first place of publication.

Source: SPARC Author Addendum.

Authorship vs Ownership

Authorship (Moral Rights)	Ownership (Copyright)
✔ Right to be credited as the author	✔ Exclusive rights to reproduce
✔ Protection against false attribution	✔ Rights to publish and perform
✔ Right to protect the integrity of work	✔ Rights to share and modify the work
❌ Cannot be sold or transferred	✔ Can transfer all or some rights to others like publisher

Guidelines on Authorship

Agreeing on Authorship

If there are no specific rules from a journal or discipline, the research team should agree early on who qualifies as an author. It's helpful to write down these decisions and update them if roles or contributions change during the project.

Who Qualifies as an Author

An author is usually someone who has made a meaningful contribution to the research and is willing to take responsibility for their part. This can include:

Helping to design the study or collect, analyze, or interpret data
Writing the manuscript and/or reviewing it to improve its quality

Final Approval and Accountability

Everyone listed as an author should approve the final version of the paper. Each author should understand the content and be able to explain their own contribution to the work.