Trinity University's Open Access Policy for Faculty

The Trinity University Open Access Policy encourages faculty authors to retain non-commercial copyright for their scholarly publications and provides them with the means to negotiate those rights with their publishers. 

The copyright for your scholarly work originally belongs to you, the author. Whether or not you retain all or some of your rights is a matter that can in most cases be negotiated with your publisher through a contract or publication agreement.

After your article is accepted for publication, but before you sign the contract, verify whether or not the publisher's contract grants you non-commercial copyright for your work. Such permission may be:

• included in your contract;
• posted on the publisher's website;
• listed at Sherpa/RoMEO, a site that compiles information about various publishers' policies.

If the publisher's contract does not allow you to retain non-commercial copyright for your work, you may attempt to secure it by:

• completing Trinity University's "Addendum to Publication Agreement" (see box at right) and attaching it to your contract; or
• adding your own statement to the contract declaring your intent to retain non-commercial copyright.
   

For assistance with this process, please contact Chris Nolan, Jane Costanza, or your liaison librarian.