Some resources for understanding what you're signing
By Anna
I am assuming that the biggest players in the publishing sphere, money wise -- the “Big Five” or “Big Six”, as they’re called -- are counting on authors to not read the terms and conditions. In any case, it's important to be informed, and to stand up for yourself if you feel like you aren't getting fair terms, because you deserve fair terms.
Before you begin
Before you read the terms, look up where you want to publish and which company owns the journal. Are you willing to sign with them? Decide what tradeoffs you’re willing to make. Communicate those tradeoffs. Have a conversation. (I didn't and I wish I had.) Sometimes you have to play it by ear; I had one paper where I did a ton of work and tbh I couldn’t stand the prospect of giving up official credit on it by yanking my name, so I did sign the agreement with Elsevier in the end. I read it so I would know what I was getting into though. Fortunately I think my PI owns the rights to that as well, but it didn’t come cheap. We shouldn’t have to pay to own papers that we’ve written, but here we are.
Read them
Now comes the part that people often skip.
Read the terms and conditions. Ideally, this is before you pick a journal to submit your paper to, but if not, that is okay. Better late than never. The goal is to read them at some point.
A handful of companies publish most journals, so when you’ve read one set of terms and conditions, you’ve read most of them. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that the terms and conditions for NeuroImage are similar or the same as the terms and conditions for The Lancet Neurology, which are both owned by Elsevier. It’s not just me who’s saying this; a copyright lawyer from Author’s Alliance said the same thing at a webinar. If this is your first time reading the terms and conditions, you’re not alone; the lawyer said most people don’t, and I didn’t either. I ultimately found it empowering to read them. No matter your lab environment, no matter whether you end up having control over where the paper gets published, this is the one thing you can do. The thing you can definitely control is whether you read the terms and conditions, and the other thing you can probably control is whether you put your name on your paper (you should be able to control this, but it doesn’t always happen. Fortunately I have always had a say on this).
But they're complicated! What do I do?
I can relate! Here are some ideas for resources, in no particular order:
If you work at a research institution with a copyright or scholarly publishing office, talk to them. It’s their full-time job to help people navigate the publishing process, and they are happy to help. I wish I had talked to the officer at my institution earlier in my career and not just when I was leaving and trying to do research on publishing. They also have websites.
Also, did you know copyright officers do presentations? And that they are happy to do so? That’s what the copyright officer at my institution told me. So talk to your department head or your team and see if you can have someone from the copyright office give a talk. If you are the department head or in charge of scheduling speakers, ask someone from the copyright office to give a talk.
If you don’t have an in-house copyright officer, talk to your institution’s librarian. Everyone I talked to at my then-institution was happy to help, and I am sure they would have ideas of whom to talk to.
If you don’t have an institution or a librarian, check out guides from places that put them on the Internet. Authors Alliance, Johns Hopkins, Penn State and University of California have helpful copyright resources and are great places to start.
What about Gen AI? The one time I used ChatGPT was to interpret particularly dense paragraphs of terms and conditions (not for a publishing agreement but when deciding whether to download an app). And it was helpful. However, I would strongly suggest talking to people first if you can. Just like you wouldn’t outsource statistics or study design to ChatGPT or Claude (I hope), I recommend talking to people.
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