This came up at a past PUG session, a question about what authors can do when they’ve already published a book under “all rights reserved” copyright and want to transition to an open license.
At the Open Horizons conference in Winnipeg, Althea Wheeler, Copyright Strategy Manager at the University of Manitoba Copyright Office, presented an addendum designed to help with exactly this situation. She has generously given permission for it to be shared with the Pressbooks community.
The Adaptable Publication OA Addendum (attached) is a practical tool for authors navigating this issue. Althea has noted she’s open to feedback and suggestions for improvement, so if you use it or share it with authors at your institution, she’d love to hear how it works in practice!
If this is something you’ve encountered with authors at your network, feel free to share and adapt.
Thanks for sharing @Amanda_Coolidge this is great. I know that @arwalz and others in the community have also done a lot of work around ‘rights reversion’ and might have additional tips or resources to share in a similar vein.
Thanks for tagging me, @SteelWagstaff! Yes, I have done a bit of work around Rights Reversion to openly licensed publications. What an interesting instrument,@Amanda_Coolidge I’m not an attorney, cannot provide legal advise – all of the usual caveats – but think that this is a really great idea! It will be interesting to see how publishers respond to this. Would love to know! In my experience (former) publishers will have their own request form, want to have everything vetted by the legal team (which takes a lot of time) etc. They usually want rights to sell any unsold print copies and maybe other things – but this is definitely a good way to get the conversation started!
Here are my slides and a link to the recording of a presentation on this topic: https://hdl.handle.net/10919/121324 from OpenEd 2024. One thing to note: Publisher versions often include 3rd party works (figures, photos etc) reproduced with permission. These do not return or “revert” to the author(s) as they were not theirs to begin with. These 3rd party items should be identified and either removed, permission obtained (preferably with release under the same license as the overall work), or replaced with openly-licensed alternatives.