POLICY FOR EXECUTION OF COPYRIGHT TRANSFER AND ASSIGNMENT FORMS

Fermilab employees and users often write reports that are submitted for outside publication either in journals or conference proceedings. It is the common business practice of publishers to require authors to sign a transfer or assignment of copyright form prior to publication.

WHO?
As a Fermilab employee, any report prepared as a result of work you performed under the DOE/FRA contract falls into the category of "work for hire" and the transfer agreement must be signed by an authorized representative of the Lab on behalf of FRA and not by you (the author). Your paper must first be submitted to the Technical Publications Office and receive a preprint number. To submit a paper, please see our preprint submission or request form.

WHY?
The Lab established this policy to ensure that all intellectual property rights are protected.

WHERE?
When you receive a copyright form, you should fill in the top portion of the form that asks for the title of the report and the author(s) name. Then bring the form, along with a copy of your report, to the Technical Publications Office, MS 109 WH3W #358 (Technical Publications Office) x5693 for review and execution.

HOW?
The Lab takes the following steps to ensure that copyright forms are properly executed.
The Technical Publications Office adds any necessary language to the copyright form to ensure that you and the Lab can reuse, without cost, all or any part of your contribution and can allow others to do so for DOE/FRA purposes. This protects your right as an author to use figures, data and other extracts from the article in future publications or to use part or all of the article in a compilation of your work.

If the Technical Publications Office has questions regarding the propriety of certain clauses or wording, the form is referred to the Fermilab Legal Office. Upon receipt, counsel reviews the document to ascertain acceptability to the author, FRA and DOE, and adds or deletes any necessary clauses.

Concurrently, the Technical Publications Office also submits a copy of the report to the Office of Research and Technology Applications for patent review. This review protects the rights of the author, FRA and DOE to any potentially patentable technology.

After appropriate reviews, the manager of the Technical Publications Office signs the copyright form on behalf of FRA and returns the form to the author or submits the form to the publisher per the author's instructions.
A copy of the executed copyright form is retained in the Technical Publications Office as a permanent record.
The Technical Publications Office executes copyright agreements as quickly as possible; usually within a few days. We ask, however, that you give us as much lead time as possible.

To begin the process, the Technical Publications Office will accept a draft of your report, provided the content won't be changed significantly. If you have any special time considerations and need the form processed as soon as possible, please let the Technical Publications Office staff know.

If you have questions regarding the Fermilab copyright policy, please call the Technical Publications Office at x5693 or send e-mail to techpubs@fnal.gov.

EXPERIMENTERS
Experimenters who are not Fermilab employees should follow the copyright guidelines and policies of their home institutions.

CONTRACT ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Scientific and technical information developed from work conducted at Fermilab is managed according to DOE Order 1430.1D, Scientific and Technical Information Management, and DOE G 1430.1D, Guide to Management of Scientific and Technical Information.

All Fermilab authors (both employees and experimenters), who are submitting technical reports for outside publication, must print the following statement at the bottom of the first page of the report, if it was written in the course of work performed at Fermilab.

This acknowledgment must be included on submissions to both print and electronic journals and conference publications.

The statement follows: Work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359.

USE OF FERMILAB LOGO, NAME OR WILSON HALL OUTLINE
The Fermilab logo, Wilson Hall outline, and the name Fermilab are registered trademarks. Fermilab has a license from DOE to use these three marks. If these marks are to be used for purposes other than official Fermilab business, permission must be obtained from the Fermilab Legal Office. These marks cannot be altered in any way even for official use.

PHOTOCOPYING COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
Individuals or nonprofit libraries acting for them are free to make copies of articles to use in research and teaching. For any other use, permission must be obtain from the publisher.

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