Friendly Sample Contract Clause: Academic Legal Journal (4) Paragraph 3

Sample Contract Clause

You may at all times use and distribute original printed copies or photocopied duplicates of the Article, or any portion thereof, as it appeared in the [journal], whether for personal, professional, or teaching purposes. You also have the right to reprint or republish the Article, or any portion thereof, in any book or article that you may write or contribute to, but if you do so, you must comply with the provisions of Paragraphs 3, 5, and 8 of this Agreement.

This is a contract for publication of an article in a scholarly journal (law review). Section 3 of the contract gave the publisher the exclusive right to publish the work for one year. Section 5 gave the publisher the right to upload a copy of the article onto legal databases. Paragraph 8 set out how the journal should be credited if the author subsequently publishes all or part of the article somewhere else. During the one year of the publisher's exclusivity, the contract nonetheless allows the author to make and distribute photocopies of the article (as published in the journal) to the author's students or for other professional and personal purposes. (The contract does not allow the author to distribute the article over digital media during the one year of the publisher's exclusivity.) After the one year, the author retrieves her exclusive rights to publish the work anywhere, in any format, but she must credit the original publisher, and the journal may license the inclusion of the article in legal databases.