From the Science Commons blog …

“Together with SPARC and MIT, we are proud to announce the release of a set of online tools designed to help authors retain rights over their scholarly works, including the right to self-archive their material.

The Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine is one of these tools, making it easier for authors to select and attach an addendum to the standard copyright transfer form, allowing them to amend the traditional terms of agreement with publishers. The Addendum Engine makes this as simple as point-and-click.

The tool can be found on the Science Commons, SPARC and MIT Web sites, and can also be readily implemented on university sites, such as our first adopter – Carnegie Mellon University. By providing the means to easily plug in the addendum generator on sites such as Carnegie Mellons, the tool takes on a new role, serving as a university toolkit.

Through the Addendum Engine, authors can choose from an array of provided addenda, some of which have been consolidated in order to address the problem of addenda proliferation. This is true of the Science Commons and SPARC addenda, named “Access-Reuse”, a combination of the SPARC Author Addendum and the Science Commons Publish-Creative Commons Addendum.

For details on specifying a default agreement and to integrate the addendum generator onto your Web site like Carnegie Mellon, click here.

We invite you to take a look at the other addenda and materials part of this release. For more information about the launch, please read the official press release. You can also learn more about this project on our Web site, or by visiting SPARC and MIT. “