FAQ: Copyright, Self-Archiving, Deposit Mandate, and Permissions
COPYRIGHT ISSUES
Why does Annual Reviews require transfer of copyright?
The transfer of copyright allows Annual Reviews (a nonprofit organization) to publish and distribute your article; to recover the costs of publication without immediate commercial competition; to maximize worldwide protection against infringement, libel, and other violations; to make arrangements for abstracting, indexing, translating, and reprinting; to efficiently process third party reprint requests; to manage inbound and outbound linking protocols; and to ensure the long-term accessibility of the review. Further, copyright transfer codifies Annual Reviews' flexibility to disseminate your work as broadly as possible via whatever media and delivery mechanisms are appropriate today and in the future.
After copyright transfer, Annual Reviews authors continue to enjoy substantial rights to their work (see below).
What if I am a U.S. government employee who is not allowed to transfer copyright?
If you and all your co-authors are United States federal employees who have written your manuscript within the scope of your official duties, then Annual Reviews does not seek copyright. This is because domestic copyright protection is not available for any work of the United States Government. Therefore, your article will appear with the following footnote to the chapter title: “This is a work of the U.S. Government and is not subject to copyright protection in the United States.” If you are a U.S. federal employee who wrote the manuscript outside the scope of your employment, then you own the copyright in the work despite your federal employee status. In this event, you will be asked to complete the Annual Reviews Copyright Transfer Agreement. If any of the work’s co-authors is not a U.S. federal employee, then the work is not copyright exempt and all authors will be asked to complete the non-federal-employee section of the Annual Reviews Copyright Transfer Agreement.
What if I am a British or Commonwealth government employee who is not allowed to transfer copyright?
If you or any of your coauthors are employees of the British government or of a British Commonwealth government who have written within the scope of your official duties, then Annual Reviews does not seek transfer of copyright. This is because the work is subject to Crown Copyright, which cannot be transferred by the authors. Your article will appear with the following footnote to the article title: “This paper was authored by an employee(s) of the British Government as part of their official duties and is therefore subject to Crown Copyright.”
Prior to publication, each author who is subject to Crown copyright regulations (as described above) should sign section (c) of the Annual Reviews Copyright Transfer and Authors’ Rights Agreement AND must return to the Production Editor a completed and signed Publishing Articles Application, a copy of which may be obtained from the Production Editor.
Coauthors of a Crown Copyright article who did not create the work within the scope of their official duties as employees of the British government or of a British Commonwealth government should also sign section (c) of the Annual Reviews Copyright Transfer and Authors’ Rights Agreement BUT need not supply a completed Publishing Articles Application.
Reuse of the article by any coauthor, British or not, must be approved by the British government and typically requires a Public Sector Information License. For more information on this process, visit the Office of Public Sector Information Web site.
If you and your coauthors are British government or British Commonwealth government employees who created the work outside the scope of your employment, then you own the copyright in the work despite your government employee status. In this event, please complete section (a) of the Annual Reviews Copyright Transfer Agreement.
What happens if I do not hold the copyright on my submitted manuscript?
Authors who are employees of other governments (outside of the U.S.) may be restricted from transferring copyright as a condition of their employment. If this applies to you, please contact the production editor and request that alternative language be used in the copyright agreement granting your government a nonexclusive, royalty-free license in and to the copyright covering the review. If you are a privately employed author and have written your review in your official capacity as an employee, you will be required to transfer copyright to Annual Reviews. Your employer will retain the same rights as individual authors, such as patent rights.
What rights do I enjoy as an author?
After manuscript acceptance and copyright transfer, substantial rights are granted to the author(s) by Annual Reviews:
- The retention of patent and trademark rights to processes or procedures described within the work.
- The nonexclusive right to use, reproduce, distribute, perform, update, create derivatives, and make copies of the work (electronically or in print) in connection with the author’s teaching, conference presentations, lectures, and publications, provided proper attribution is given.
- The nonexclusive right to store the publisher-supplied PDF file of the work (“the published version”) in electronic reserve rooms for access by students at the author’s institution as part of the author’s teaching activities, so long as these files are made available free of charge and are removed when no longer connected to the author’s own teaching.
- The nonexclusive right to use, reproduce, and distribute the publisher-supplied PDF of the work (“the published version”) in coursepacks, within the author’s own institution, so long as these copies are distributed to students free of charge.
- The right to self-archive a “preprint” version of the work, defined as a manuscript that has not yet been reviewed, edited, or prepared for publication by Annual Reviews, provided (a) any preprint posted to the Web after the completion of this Transfer Agreement states explicitly by which Annual Reviews series the manuscript has been accepted, and (b) after the published version of the work appears on the Annual Reviews Web site, the preprint version is amended to include the following acknowledgment and link: “Posted with permission from the Annual Review of _________________, Volume ___ ©_______ by Annual Reviews, http://www.annualreviews.org”.
- The right to self-archive, after the work’s publication, an Annual Reviews-supplied ePrint URL (a specially-keyed URL that allows nonsubscribers to access an Annual Review article freely via the Annual Reviews Web site) on one personal Web site and/or one institutional repository. The ePrint URL provides free access to your article; Annual Reviews does not grant permission to directly self-archive a postprint file or the PDF of the article’s published version.
- The right to distribute an Annual Reviews-supplied ePrint URL to colleagues who request reprints.
- The right to include the work, in whole or in part, in a dissertation or thesis.
Does the copyright agreement cover any supplementary materials that are posted alongside the online version of my review?
The copyright agreement and the author rights enumerated above apply to both the review itself and any copyrightable supplementary files or data the author supplies in conjunction with the review.
How do I obtain a copy of the copyright transfer agreement?
The production editor will provide you with the appropriate forms once the manuscript has been accepted for publication.
If I am not the sole author, are my colleagues also required to complete the copyright transfer agreement?
Annual Reviews requires all authors and coauthors to complete and sign the copyright transfer agreement before the review can be published.
What do I do about copyright and permissions for illustrations and supplemental materials?
Authors must obtain written permission to reuse (either directly or with minor modification) illustrative or supplemental materials in which third parties hold the copyright (e.g. images published in journals other than Annual Reviews journals). (Note: Even when traced or copied into a new drawing, illustrations whose content has not been substantially altered remain under the copyright of the source publication or author. Their reuse still requires formal permission.)
Please send permissions documents with your initial submission of figures to Annual Reviews.
What’s the deal with the Annual Reviews ePrint URL?
Our policy offers authors the right, immediately upon publication, to post "ePrint URLs" (essentially free links to the final published) in two places: the author's own Web site and the author's institution's research repository.
For us the benefit of the ePrint URL approach is huge: When people interested in free copies of review's PDF ('author's reprints') fetch those copies free from our site via the ePrint URL, this "usage" gets counted by our Web host; we can then report it to our subscribing institutions -- hard evidence of the review's persistent value. (Literature reviews like AR's remain important long beyond various embargo periods like 6 or 12 months.)
The contrary phenomenon -- PDFs circulating "in the wild" of the 'Net because the files (and not ePrint URLs) have been posted directly by authors or institutions -- offers no account of our subscription's value -- indeed may soon (as technology aggregates access to such copies) compete with that value. Such aggregation may in fact compete in a way that will eventually undermine our ability to organize (and provide numerous other publication services for) our 40 Annual Review series.
SELF-ARCHIVING AND FUNDER MANDATES
What is the difference between a preprint, postprint, and the published version of my review?
A preprint is a manuscript that has not yet been reviewed, edited, or prepared for publication by a publisher. In essence it is the submitted version of a paper.
A postprint is the final manuscript of a reviewed paper accepted for journal publication, including all modifications resulting from the reviewers’ feedback, but not yet copy-edited, illustration-edited, typeset, or formatted by the publisher.
The published version is the definitive article as it appears in print and/or on the publisher’s Web site. It includes all modifications from the review process, copyediting and illustration editing, and formatting changes made by the editorial team.
May I post a preprint of my review in an institutional repository?
You are free to post the preprint version of your work on an institutional repository. As described in the “What rights do I enjoy as an author?” section above, you may self-archive a preprint version of your work provided (a) any preprint posted to the Web after the completion of the Annual Reviews Copyright Transfer Agreement states explicitly by which Annual Reviews series the manuscript has been accepted, and (b) after the published version of the work appears on the Annual Reviews Web site, the preprint version is amended to include the following acknowledgment and link: “Posted with permission from the Annual Review of _________________, Volume ___ ©_______ by Annual Reviews, http://www.annualreviews.org”.
May I post a postprint or the published version of my review anywhere?
As outlined in the “What rights do I enjoy as an author?” section above, you are not permitted to post a postprint or the published version of your review anywhere on the open Internet. However, Annual Reviews both permits and encourages its authors to self-archive, after the work’s publication, an Annual Reviews-supplied ePrint URL (a specially-keyed URL that allows nonsubscribers to access an Annual Review article freely via the Annual Reviews Web site) on (a) one personal Web site and/or one institutional repository. The ePrint URL is automatically supplied by the production editor upon completion of the production process.
What is Annual Reviews’ policy with regard to NIH’s PubMed Central requirements and other deposit mandates?
Annual Reviews complies with a number of institutional and funding-body mandates [http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php?colour=green]. Annual Review articles are explicitly exempt from the NIH mandate. The Public Access Policy specifically excludes content that is invited and edited, as Annual Reviews articles are. Publications to which the Public Access Policy does not apply may be listed in documents submitted to NIH as "(PMC Exempt - invited review)". Nevertheless, if deposit to PMC will help you in any way, you may indeed make the deposit (stipulating, please, a 12-month embargo).
PERMISSION TO REUSE
Must I obtain permission from Annual Reviews to reuse the material in my review?
No. Our copyright transfer agreement provides “…the nonexclusive right to use, reproduce, distribute, perform, update, create derivatives, and make copies of the work (electronically or in print) in connection with the author’s teaching, conference presentations, lectures, and publications, provided proper attribution is given.”
OTHER DISTRIBUTION ISSUES
May I provide a copy of my review to a colleague, and, if so, what version?
Annual Review authors are free to send colleagues an Annual Review ePrint URL (see below) for the purposes of scholarly exchange. Such access may not be provided for compensation, for the purposes of republication or preparing derivative works, or as part of the systematic provision of copyrighted material to a third party.
An ePrint URL is a "keyed URL" (a unique Web address) that grants free online access to the author's review—in both Web-browsable form (as HTML pages, with links to other online resources) and "reprint" form (a printable PDF file).
You also have the nonexclusive right to store the publisher-supplied PDF of your work (“the published version”) in electronic reserve rooms for access by students at your institution as part of your teaching activities, so long as these files are distributed free of charge and are removed when no longer connected to your teaching.
Further, you have the nonexclusive right to use, reproduce, and distribute the publisher-supplied PDF of the work (“the published version”) in coursepacks, within your own institution, so long as these copies are distributed free of charge.
