Increase Access to Your Published Articles

If you are interested in posting your material in Institutional Repositories or course Web sites, then the information located at www.carl-abrc.ca/projects/author/author-e.html will be of interest to you. If you have other questions, feel free to contact your Liaison Librarian.

Read on for background info...

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) recently released the SPARC Canadian Author Addendum, a new tool for authors in Canada to retain key rights to the journal articles they publish.

Traditional publishing agreements often require that authors grant exclusive rights to the publisher. The new SPARC Canadian Author Addendum enables authors to secure a more balanced agreement by retaining select rights, such as the rights to reproduce, reuse, and publicly present the articles they publish for non-commercial purposes. It will help Canadian researchers to comply with granting council public access policies, such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Policy on Access to Research Outputs. The Canadian Addendum reflects Canadian copyright law and is an adaptation of the original U.S. version of the SPARC Author Addendum.

"The SPARC Canadian Author Addendum allows researchers to have maximum impact and visibility for their publications - with the comfort of knowing important rights still belong to them," stated Carolynne Presser, Chair of the CARL Scholarly Communication Committee and Director of Libraries at the University of Manitoba.

"The Canadian Addendum is an important contribution to the ongoing international movement to support authors in making research articles accessible to all who may benefit from their findings," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. "Canada has been a leader in the move toward increased access to research and we're pleased to have played a role in collaborating with CARL on this important initiative."

An explanatory brochure complements the Addendum. Both the brochure and addendum are available in French and English on the CARL and SPARC Web sites and will be widely distributed. SPARC, in conjunction with ARL and ACRL, has also introduced a free Web cast on Understanding Author Rights. See http://www.arl.org/sparc/author for details.

For more information, please see the CARL Web site at http://www.carl-abrc.ca or the SPARC Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc.

CARL is the leadership organization for the Canadian research library community. CARL's members represent Canada's 27 major academic research libraries, Library and Archives Canada, the Library of Parliament and the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI).

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC's advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research.