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Copyright Guidelines

It is the policy of Annual Reviews to obtain a written transfer of copyright ownership from our authors and then to grant back to authors a broad array of parallel rights. The transfer of copyright allows Annual Reviews (a nonprofit organization) to publish and distribute your article; to recover the costs of publication without immediate commercial competition; to maximize worldwide protection against infringement, libel, and other violations; to make arrangements for abstracting, indexing, translating, and reprinting; to efficiently process third-party reprint requests; to manage inbound and outbound linking protocols; and to ensure the long-term accessibility of the review. Furthermore, copyright transfer codifies Annual Reviews' flexibility to produce and disseminate your work as broadly as possible via whatever media and delivery mechanisms are appropriate today and in the future.

The Production Editor will provide you with the appropriate forms once the manuscript has been accepted for publication. Annual Reviews requires all authors and coauthors to complete and sign the copyright transfer agreement before the review can be published.

After manuscript acceptance and copyright transfer, substantial rights are granted to the author(s) by Annual Reviews:

  • The retention of patent and trademark rights to processes or procedures described within the work.
  • The nonexclusive right to use, reproduce, distribute, perform, update, create derivatives, and make copies of the work (electronically or in print) in connection with the author’s teaching, conference presentations, lectures, and publications, provided proper attribution is given.
  • The nonexclusive right to store the publisher-supplied PDF file of the work (“the published version”) in electronic reserve rooms for access by students at the author’s institution as part of the author’s teaching activities, so long as these files are made available free of charge and are removed when no longer connected to the author’s own teaching.
  • The nonexclusive right to use, reproduce, and distribute the publisher-supplied PDF of the work (“the published version”) in coursepacks, within the author’s own institution, so long as these copies are distributed to students free of charge.
  • The right to self-archive a “preprint” version of the work, defined as a manuscript that has not yet been reviewed, edited, or prepared for publication by Annual Reviews, provided (a) any preprint posted to the Web after the completion of this Transfer Agreement states explicitly by which Annual Reviews series the manuscript has been accepted, and (b) after the published version of the work appears on the Annual Reviews website, the preprint version is amended to include the following acknowledgment and link: “Posted with permission from the Annual Review of XXXXX, Volume XX, © by Annual Reviews, http://www.annualreviews.org.”
  • The right to self-archive, after the work’s publication, an Annual Reviews–supplied ePrint URL (a specially keyed URL that allows nonsubscribers to access an Annual Review article freely via the Annual Reviews website) on one personal website and/or one institutional repository. The ePrint URL provides free access to your article; Annual Reviews does not grant permission to directly self-archive a postprint file or the PDF of the article’s published version.
  • The right to distribute an Annual Reviews–supplied ePrint URL to colleagues who request reprints.
  • The right to include the work, in whole or in part, in a dissertation or thesis.

US Government Employees

If you and all your co-authors are United States federal employees who have written your manuscript within the scope of your official duties, then Annual Reviews does not seek copyright. This is because domestic copyright protection is not available for any work of the United States Government. Therefore, your article will appear with the following footnote to the article title: “This is a work of the US Government and is not subject to copyright protection in the United States.” If you are a US federal employee who wrote the manuscript outside the scope of your employment, then you own the copyright to the work despite your federal employee status. In this event, you will be asked to complete the Annual Reviews Copyright Transfer Agreement. If any of the work’s co-authors is not a US federal employee, then the work is not copyright exempt and all authors will be asked to complete the non-government-employee section of the Annual Reviews Copyright Transfer Agreement.

British or Commonwealth Government Employee

If you or any of your coauthors are employees of the British government or of a British Commonwealth government who have written within the scope of your official duties, then Annual Reviews does not seek transfer of copyright. This is because the work is subject to Crown Copyright, which cannot be transferred by the authors. Your article will appear with the following footnote to the article title: “This paper was authored by an employee(s) of the British Government as part of their official duties and is therefore subject to Crown Copyright. Reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office/Queen's Printer for Scotland and [name of Department].”

If you and your coauthors are British government or British Commonwealth government employees who created the work outside the scope of your employment, then you own the copyright to the work despite your government employee status. In this event, all authors will be asked to complete the non-government -employee section of the Annual Reviews Copyright Transfer Agreement.

Other Government Employees

Authors who are employees of other governments (outside of the United States) may be restricted from transferring copyright as a condition of their employment.  If this applies to you, please contact your Production Editor and request that alternative language be used in the copyright agreement granting your government a nonexclusive, royalty-free license in and to the copyright covering the review. If you are a privately employed author and have written your review in your official capacity as an employee, you will be required to transfer copyright to Annual Reviews. Your employer will retain the same rights as individual authors, such as patent rights.

Copyright and Permissions for Illustrations and Supplemental Materials

The copyright agreement and the author rights enumerated above apply to both the review itself and any copyrightable supplemental files or data the author supplies in conjunction with the review. Authors must obtain written permission to reuse (either directly or with minor modification) illustrative or supplemental materials to which third parties hold the copyright (e.g., images published in journals other than Annual Reviews journals). (Note: Even when traced or copied into a new drawing, illustrations whose content has not been substantially altered remain under the copyright of the source publication or author. Their reuse still requires formal permission.)

Please send permissions documents with your initial submission of figures to Annual Reviews.

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