If you do not want to or cannot publish in an Open Access journal for any reason, you should agree an author addendum with the publisher. This is an author’s addition to a standard publishing contract in which the contractual conditions are defined or changed.

The author addendum enables you to protect important rights. For example, you can ensure that you are allowed to publish your own articles and works on your personal website or in a digital repository. You can also define that they can be used for teaching or as the basis for future research. This therefore makes it possible to use the green route of Open Access in the context of secondary publication. In this way you can at least make your publication freely available after an embargo period through self-archiving. For example, in Germany there now are framework contracts for more and more subscription journals that allow immediate publication in Open Access. This is the case in the context of the DEAL contracts with the publishers Wiley and SpringerNature.

Get in touch with the Open Access officers of your institution to ask for assistance in safeguarding your author’s rights. They are experienced in applying author addenda that enable you to retain some or all of your rights.