Skip to Main Content
University of Texas University of Texas Libraries

Open Access at UT Austin

Learn more about Open Access and what is happening at UT Austin to improve access to research.

Author Rights

Copyright to Scholarly Work

UT Austin faculty and students own the copyright to their creations. Copyright owners have the option of assigning non-exclusive or exclusive rights to that work to third parties, like publishers. 

You can retain copyright to your work through the use of an author addendum or through conversations and negotiation with your editor. If you are unable to negotiate to retain full rights to your work, you may still be able to share a copy of it. Most publishers allow the author's final manuscript to be shared publicly. The author's final manuscript is the version of your article that reflects all changes from the peer review process, but that has not yet gone through final copy editing and layout work. It is usually a double-spaced .doc file. If you are curious about policies from a specific journal, you can find more information on Sherpa Romeo. Sherpa Romeo aggregates publisher open access policies and provides a summary of that information on a journal by journal basis.

More on Copyright

Interested in learning more about copyright? Check out the Copyright Crash Course.

Creative Commons

Are you interested in seeing wider reuse of your work? If so, you might consider using a Creative Commons (CC) license. CC licenses work with existing copyright, meaning you are still the copyright owner, but they allow you to notify potential users of the types of reuse you are comfortable with. If you aren't okay with commercial reuse, you can specify that. If you'd rather that people didn't make changes to your work, you can state that too. CC licenses are customizable to fit your specific needs.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.