Copyright and Open Access
Authors must determine if they have signed exclusive or non-exclusive rights with their publishers to their work. If an exclusive contract has been signed with the publishing company, authors can request to deposit their work in a digital repository. Oftentimes publishers will allow pre-print or pre-refereed versions of a work to be deposited into a repository, but it is worth checking to see if the publisher’s version is allowed as well.
Many publishers’ information regarding their allowance of digital repositories can be found at Sherpa RoMEO (Rights Metadata for Open Archiving), in an easy-to-use search format. If your publisher is not listed in Sherpa RoMEO, you can suggest that they add them to the website.
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/
All work published in Research Showcase is available to anyone, free of charge around the world. This does NOT mean that you give up your copyright or your rights as an author. Creative Commons offers specific licenses that spell out what you are willing to share, but you do not have to do this to retain your rights. For more information, visit http://creativecommons.org/about/license/
For an easy guide to author’s rights and digital publishing, please see Charles W. Bailey’s “Author’s Rights, Tout de Suite” here: http://www.library.txstate.edu/services/faculty/authorsrights.html