How do you become an author?

You become an author when you create a work, no further formalities needed. An author has full ownership of the rights, namely:

• moral rights (attribution, integrity, withdrawal of the work from the market), which always remain with the author and are inalienable;
• economic or patrimonial rights of exploitation (distribution, communication, reproduction, translation, etc.), which can be partially or exclusively transferred.

Transfer of economic rights

The author of a work may decide to transfer property rights in his or her work to third parties, whether publishers or other market players.  The transfer, or assignment, takes place through a written agreement and may concern all or part of the rights only: the right of reproduction (making copies), translation, reworking or inclusion in other works, distribution (in other forms or ways) etc., in addition to the right of publication.

Agreement with the publisher

The main purpose of a publication agreement is to define which rights the author assigns to the publisher and whether these rights are assigned exclusively or non-exclusively.

There is no requirement to assign all exclusive rights in order to have a work published. If you do, you may find that you are unable to reuse your work indefinitely, not even - for example - for education purposes.

To resolve this, an author can propose an addendum to the publication agreement through which they retain some rights for education and research purposes and for OA dissemination through an institutional archive. A highly regarded addendum model is the one created by SPARK -the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition-, available in English, and in Italian translated by Antonella de Robbio of the University of Padua.

Alternatively...

Applying an open license to a scientific work (article, dataset, and any other research product) is a way for the author to specify the conditions under which their work can be accessed, reused and modified.

How a scientific work is disseminated has no influence on the protection of copyright

The most popular open licenses for scientific content are Creative Commons, which allow the author to decide which rights to keep. CCs are widely used for articles, books, grey literature and datasets, whereas they are not suitable as software licenses (see Open Source Initiative here).

The License Chooser available on the Creative Commons website, https://chooser-beta.creativecommons.org/, helps authors, step by step, to select the type of licence that best suits their needs.

Who are predatory publishers?

According to the Committee on Publication Ethics, the expression “predatory publishing” generally designates the systematic for-profit publishing of purportedly scholarly content (in journals and articles, monographs, books or conference proceedings) in a deceptive or fraudulent manner and without any regard for quality assurance.

Predatory publishers actually represent a problem for the integrity of scientific communication.