Copyright and PFW's Open Access Policy
Copyright law grants the copyright holder (author) exclusive rights, unless or until they sign a legal document giving some or all of these rights to another party, e.g. publisher. While many publishers ask authors to transfer all (exclusive) copyright to them at time of publication, publishers only need permission to publish the work, not a complete transfer of copyright.
Authors may choose not to grant "exclusive" rights to publishers. By retaining non-exclusive rights, authors can continue to use their work in the classroom, share with colleagues, reuse portions of the work in future publications, and add the work to their institutional repository.
In 2015, the faculty senate passed an Open Access Policy that grants non-exclusive rights to faculty scholarly articles to the University for the purpose of making this content widely and freely available in an open access repository, i.e. Opus. The assigning of non-exclusive rights in scholarly articles to the university prevents faculty from assigning exclusive rights to the publisher. This frees faculty from the need to negotiate with publishers concerning the grant of exclusive rights.
For more details about Copyright, your author rights, including a Checklist for Reviewing Publisher Copyright Agreements and an Addendum to Publication Agreements for CIC Authors, and 's Open Access Policy:
