Addenda to Agreement

A contract amendment is useful when the author wishes to retain key rights to disseminate the article. It is a addition to the publication contract, considered as an amendment. To be valid, it must be approved by both parties.

The amendment usually focuses on the right to republish (or disseminate) the manuscript in an institutional archive, such as the Archive ouverte UNIGE. This includes negotiating the embargo period: it should be a maximum of 6 months according to the requirements of some funders (e.g. SNSF), but this is not necessarily what publishers provide for in their publication contracts or policies (see Sherpa Romeo for journal policies).

t is possible to draw on several existing addendum models, for example the SPARC model (in two versions, one for the US and one for Canada); or the Creative Commons addendum models. For articles published by UNIGE authors, we recommend adding a Creative Commons Addendum to the publishing contract in order to benefit from copyright retention.