Publishers may discourage or even create significant barriers for authors who want to reuse their own work, or share it with others; meanwhile, granting agencies such as CIHR and SSHRC increasingly require that work funded by them be made available openly.

Negotiating changes to standard publishing agreements can help authors to avoid or mitigate barriers to reuse and sharing, while facilitating both accountability requirements and the open sharing of scholarship that authors want to do.

When choosing where to submit your work for publication, one important consideration should be what rights you retain as author, or may be able to negotiate in the publishing contract.

Prioritizing your author rights is important because this determines your flexibility to decide how and where students, colleagues and the public may access your work — including on your own website, in D2L or other learning management systems, or through the Library's institutional repository, VIUSpace.

If you decide to self-archive, VIUSpace offers these advantages:

• a stable link is created that can be used to link to your work from other course or websites
• your work can be discovered through Library search tools and through Google Scholar
• professional application of metadata increases the "findability" of your work
• content is backed up through the university network, reducing the potential for short term loss or loss of control
• content is preserved through the Library's participation in a regional digital preservation network, ensuring long term preservation of digital content

SHERPA/ROMeO offers a database of author rights, searchable by journal title or publisher, that summarizes the rights that each offers and provides links to publisher websites for specific conditions, including statements that should be included with self-archived pre- or post-prints. Keep in mind that it may be possible to negotiate additional rights to those described in the database or offered in a contract.