Authors' rights

Everyone is an author and almost everything you create is protected immediately and automatically by copyright. That protection can last for more than a century, and it has serious implications for how people can share and reuse your work.

The resources collected here should help you understand your rights and some of the options available to you as you think about managing them to meet your goals.

For a general overview of copyright, check out our Copyright Essentials page. And because every author is also a user who must gather the work of others for research and even incorporate others’ work into her own (as an illustration or the subject of critique, for example), you may find our User Rights and Responsibilities pages helpful. Finally, authors who work or study at UVA may need to refer to relevant Laws, Policies, and Guidelines to learn how your work may be governed by existing rules.

Finally, this slide presentation, which I use in my workshops, provides an overview of author rights in a scholarly context.