These and other questions are heard more and more frequently on campuses. That’s why SPARC has developed Author Rights – an educational initiative that informs faculty across all disciplines about how to use the SPARC Author Addendum to secure your rights as authors of journal articles.
The SPARC Author Addendum is a legal instrument that authors may use to modify their publisher agreements, enabling them to keep selected key rights to their articles, such as:
SPARC’s Author Rights brochure identifies the rights faculty have as copyright holders and encourages you to retain the rights you need to ensure the broadest practical access to your articles. It explains how to use the SPARC Author Addendum and even gives tips on what to do if the publisher rejects the Addendum. It also offers specific language authors can insert in a publisher agreement when their article will be deposited in NIH’s PubMed Central.
This information is taken from the SPARC website: https://sparcopen.org/our-work/author-rights/
I'm the author, don't I automatically have the right to post my article anywhere I want?
Maybe, it depends. To post a work to Galaxy (Quinnipiac's Online Digital Repository), you should hold the copyright to that work or have the approval of the copyright holder to do so. As the author, you are the copyright holder unless and until you transfer the copyright to someone else in a signed agreement. You should not transfer your copyright to a publisher that limits educational or non-profit access to your work. BE SURE TO READ YOUR PUBLISHER AGREEMENTS CAREFULLY!
You can find journals' and publishers' copyright and self-archiving policies on the SHERPA/RoMEO site.
For your convenience, the following are links to model publishing agreements that specifically permit such posting: