Copyright Transfer vs Licence: Keeping Your Rights

The publishing agreement often arrives around acceptance, when you least want to read it. It decides who controls your article long after publication.

Explainer · 10 min read · Directive Publications Editorial Team

What the publishing agreement decides

The agreement often arrives around acceptance, in the same busy stretch as proofs and invoices, and it is tempting to sign it in a minute. It deserves ten careful minutes. It is the contract that decides who controls your article after publication: who may post it, translate it, reuse its figures or license it to others, and whether that list includes you.

Journals give these forms different names: copyright transfer agreement, licence to publish, publishing agreement, author agreement. The title tells you little. What matters is the clause that says what you grant, which usually takes one of three forms: an assignment of copyright, an exclusive licence, or a non-exclusive licence. Find that clause first, and the rest of the form becomes much easier to read.

Three kinds of agreement, side by side

An assignment transfers ownership of the copyright to the publisher, whatever the form is called. From then on, the publisher decides how the article may be used. You keep only the rights the agreement gives back to you, plus the copyright exceptions, such as fair use or fair dealing, that apply to everyone.

An exclusive licence to publish leaves copyright in your name but gives the publisher the exclusive right to publish and license the article. The rights you licensed are no longer yours to use or pass on, except where the agreement says otherwise. The US Copyright Act defines a "transfer of copyright ownership" to include an exclusive licence and to exclude a non-exclusive one, so the practical gap between the first two models is smaller than their names suggest. Other countries' laws differ, so take local advice when a lot depends on the answer.

A non-exclusive licence gives the publisher permission to publish while you keep the copyright and every right you did not grant. Read the rest of the form even so, because a non-exclusive agreement can still carry warranties and covenants that limit what you do next. Fully open access journals often pair it with a Creative Commons licence that sets out what the public may do.

Models are mixed within one publisher, too. Springer Nature's licensing and copyright policy states that subscription authors usually sign an exclusive licence to publish, while authors transfer copyright for a small number of content types, such as review articles in selected journals, and for a small number of its society-owned journals. So do not assume last year's form matches this year's journal, even at the same imprint.

Open access does not settle who owns the copyright

A Creative Commons licence tells readers what they may do with the article. It does not tell you what you agreed with the publisher. Some open access agreements still grant the publisher exclusive rights: for example, exclusive commercial and derivative rights when a non-commercial, no-derivatives licence is chosen. So check two things separately: the copyright line on the published article, which names the holder, and the grant clause in the agreement, which says what the publisher received. The access model, the licence and the ownership of copyright are three different questions.

Two properties of Creative Commons licences matter here. They are non-exclusive, so a copyright holder can also grant other licences for the same work. And they are irrevocable: once an article is released under CC BY, the public keeps those reuse rights. Creative Commons also advises against applying a licence to material you do not own or are not authorised to license. The consequence is practical: if you have already assigned copyright or granted an exclusive licence, you cannot decide on your own to post the article under CC BY unless the agreement allows it.

Clauses to find before you sign

Work through the agreement with this list and note the answers next to your manuscript files.

1. The grant clause: assignment, exclusive licence, or non-exclusive licence
2. Retained rights: which version you may share (preprint, accepted manuscript or published PDF), where, and after what embargo
3. Personal website and repository permissions, which are not always the same
4. Reuse in your thesis, teaching, later articles and book chapters
5. Reuse of your own figures and tables in reviews, guidelines or presentations
6. Any reference to funder or institutional rights that apply to the manuscript
7. Warranties that you hold permission for third-party material and authority to sign for co-authors
8. A separate route for government works or employer-owned articles

Read the retained rights clause version by version. Under a subscription agreement the right to post usually attaches to a file you produced, and an embargo may run from publication before even that copy can go up; the journal's typeset PDF is the version most often withheld. If you are unsure which file is which, our guide to article versions sets out the differences. Jisc Open Policy Finder summarises publishers' archiving conditions journal by journal, which is useful for a quick check, but follow your signed agreement if the two disagree.

Rights your funder or institution may already hold

For many medical researchers, some rights are granted before the journal is chosen. Check these at submission, not at acceptance.

NIH funding. Under the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy, which applies to accepted manuscripts with acceptance dates on or after 1 July 2025, recipients grant NIH the right to make the author accepted manuscript publicly available in PubMed Central on the official date of publication. NIH's supplemental guidance on the Government Use License (notice NOT-OD-25-049) encourages authors to be transparent with the journal at submission, and offers this sample statement for the submitted manuscript, reproduced in UCSF's policy guide:

cOAlition S funders. The Plan S Rights Retention Strategy asks funded authors to state at submission that they have applied a CC BY licence to any author accepted manuscript arising from the submission, or CC BY-ND where the funder allows that by exception. cOAlition S's position is that this prior licence takes legal precedence over any later licence to publish or copyright transfer agreement. Use the exact wording your funder's grant conditions give, with the funder name and grant number.

Institutional policies. Some universities have rights-retention open access policies, under which faculty grant the institution a non-exclusive licence to their scholarly articles before any publishing agreement exists. These policies typically include a waiver option for individual articles. Your research office can tell you whether one applies.

Put any such statement in the manuscript and mention it to the editor as well. A cover letter is a natural place to do that, so nobody is surprised at acceptance.

Negotiating, and when to use an author addendum

You can ask for changes. Make the request small and specific, and make it before you sign. "Do you offer a non-exclusive licence?" or "May I deposit the accepted manuscript in my institutional repository on publication?" is easier to answer than a general objection to the form.

For a more formal change, SPARC publishes the SPARC Author Addendum, a legal document you attach to the publisher's agreement. Its text reserves to the author the rights to reproduce, distribute, publicly perform and publicly display the article in any medium for non-commercial purposes, to prepare derivative works, and to authorise others' non-commercial use with credit to the author and the journal. SPARC's instructions are to complete the addendum, attach it to the publishing agreement and say in a cover note that you have included it.

An addendum is only a proposed change to the contract, so the publisher may accept or reject it. The SPARC text asks the publisher to sign and return a copy, and states that publishing without signing shows assent, but a signed copy or a written reply avoids any later argument about what was agreed. If the publisher refuses, SPARC suggests explaining why the rights matter to you and asking the publisher to say why the addendum's terms are insufficient. Then compare what is on offer with what you actually need. If the standard retained rights already cover your repository deposit and thesis, that may be enough.

Special cases worth checking

US federal employees. Under US copyright law, copyright protection is not available for a work prepared by a US government officer or employee as part of their official duties. There is no US copyright to transfer, so tell the journal and ask how it handles government works rather than signing a standard transfer.

Work your employer may own. Whether you or your employer holds copyright in a scholarly article depends on your contract, your institution's intellectual property policy and national law. If the institution owns it, you may not be the right person to sign.

Co-authors. If the form asks you to sign for all authors, confirm that you have their authority, and check whether any co-author's funder or institution holds a prior licence that the agreement would conflict with.

Figures you did not create. You can only grant rights you hold. A reproduced figure needs permission that covers the licence and distribution the article will have.

Keep the signed copy

Save the signed agreement with the accepted manuscript and the DOI. Years later, when a guideline group asks to adapt a figure or you want to reuse the text in a book chapter, it is the first document you will need, and a publisher's current web page may describe newer terms than the ones you signed.

The cheapest point to protect your rights is before submission, when changing journals costs nothing. Read each journal's licence and copyright terms as part of choosing where to publish. Directive Publications links to its copyright and licensing policy from its for authors page, so you can read the terms before you submit your manuscript.