Open Access Journal Publication Agreement Templates

The text of the agreement emphasises openness and its benefits both for the journal and the author.  It uses CC BY as the licence in the agreement but this can of course be modified to a different licence type. It includes a 'brief' summary version for those authors who don't want to read the fine print; below that it includes a more complete agreement.  Either of those could be removed as deemed appropriate in your own context.

The agreement was originally written for use in a journal at the University of Otago using the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform.  We inserted the text in the 'Copyright Notice' section of the submission process, as well as duplicating this in the the About/Policies sections of the website, which was largely based on the OJS template. We used the text in the .txt file in this collection for this because there is no need for signatures of the author and journal (which are in the .pdf and .docx versions) -- OJS provides a check box for submitters to indicate that they accept the terms in the Copyright Notice.

Note that the agreement focuses on the intellectual property rights aspects of publication and does not deal with things like ethics approvals, which would need to be dealt with separately.  Ethics sign-offs are built into the JOS templates by default as a separate field for authors to fill out.

These files are in the following formats:

* PDF and .docx versions designed for where written agreements are still part of the publication process

* .txt format without any formatting to paste into your own format

I have released the documents themselves as CC0 so that you can modify them to your heart's content and don't have to worry about attribution, since that might look odd in a publication agreement.