Remember - start from the position that you own the copyright in your own work unless you sign it away to a publisher!
Give careful consideration to the publisher’s contract to ensure that you do not agree to anything in error. The contracts are often available from the publishers’ websites. Things to look out for are agreements that transfer copyright ownership to the publisher or restrictions in what can be done with the work once it has been published.
It may be possible to work with the publisher to amend terms and conditions in the licence prior to an agreement.
Subject repositories
A word of caution here! Online subject repositories like Academia.edu and ResearchGate can be good for networking but they have been criticised and in some cases been the subject of legal proceedings, for not properly adhering to copyright legislation and allowing articles to be uploaded and made available to all where authors or publishers may not have given their permission.
PrePrints
Early drafts of papers, termed Preprints, are increasingly being shared online in order to foster creative thinking and collaboration. Preprints are more common in some subject areas than others and examples of preprint servers (collections) include:
If you are considering sharing an early draft of your paper, check to see if your intended journal of publication has a policy on preprints. If the preprint is too similar to the final version you wish to submit it could be regarded as being prior publication and it may not get accepted.
