 Hello everyone! As I mentioned in my first video on this topic, copyright is an incredibly important issue in open education. So in this video, we're going to take a look at author rights. But first, a disclaimer. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. If you do need official legal advice, talk to a lawyer or your copyright office on campus. Copyright law is meant to protect an author's intellectual property rights, their rights over how their creations are used. Specifically, copyright law gives you control over how your work is displayed, reproduced, distributed, adapted, or performed. However, for many authors of educational content, especially those who've previously published content, getting these rights for their users is not easy. This is because, under most traditional publication contracts, all of an author's copyright control is transferred to their publisher. So what can you do about that? We'll start with what you can do before you publish. Your first option for keeping copyright control over your work is to publish your work openly from the beginning. Whether you publish with a large-scale open access publisher like open book publishers, your university press, or independently through a tool like OER Commons open author. Making your work open from the start is the easiest way to make sure that you keep the rights and that your work is as open as you want it to be. But be sure to read your contract carefully no matter who you're publishing with. Some open access publishers require you to assign a specific license to your work, which may be more or less restrictive than you want it to be. Look into their policies before choosing the first open publisher you see, and check out our video on open licensing for some more information. Your second option for keeping your copyright is to negotiate with your publisher for the rights you want to keep, often through the use of an addendum to your contract before you sign. Adding an addendum can be scary at first, but you don't have to do it all yourself. Spark and other groups have created excellent stock addenda that you can use in your publishing contracts to outline the rights you'd like to keep. Look at your options and customize the text to fit your needs, but be sure to run the text by a copyright official to be sure that any alterations you made to the addendum fit in. And keep a copy of your contract on file. Publishers sometimes update their policies and then attempt to make authors abide by their new terms. If you've altered your contract in any way, having a copy available will make conversations with your publisher easier in the future. Speaking of which, after you've published your work, you do still have some options for getting your copyright back. One way is through the use of a rights for version clause or termination clause in your contract. Rights for version clauses allow authors to get their copyright returned after a certain number of years if their book goes out of print or if your publisher never actually publishes your work. It happens. An example of a rights for version clause is shown on this page. If you don't see any clauses like this one in your contract and remember the wording may not be exactly the same, you may still be able to terminate your contract and retrieve your copyright. If you can't find anything explicit in your publishing contract, you do have one final option. Talk to your publisher. Publishers have a vested interest in keeping authors happy, so depending on who you're working with, they may be willing to negotiate with you. If your textbook or other published resource is now out of print, you will have better leverage for getting your rights back. Some publishers might require you to change the name of the open version of your work to avoid any confusion between the two, but it can work out. Talk to your publisher before you give up completely and remember there's always an option out there for you to consider. Thanks for watching. Remember I'm a librarian, not a lawyer. If there's something I missed, please feel free to comment and let me know and join in the conversation if you'd like to see more content like this in the future.