Copyright is that form of Intellectual Property Right (IPR) that impacts researchers/scholars. Researchers struggle to get expert guidance on questions of ownership of intellectual property in all forms of electronic and print media. In the era of digital publishing, the issue of copyright has gained prominence. The present study aims at finding out the awareness of the concept of ‘author rights’ among the researchers. It also tries to find the methods used by researchers to retain their rights to scholarly works. The study also intended to know the factors that prevent researchers from modifying the standard publication contracts of the authors. A survey of faculty members and researchers at research institutes in Mumbai was conducted. A structured questionnaire with closed-ended and open-ended questions was used for the study. A stratified random sample was selected from the sampling frame of twenty-seven research institutes in Mumbai. Further, librarians of the institutes were also asked about their involvement in copyright issues. Descriptive Analysis was carried out using SPSS 20.0. The study revealed that the awareness of researchers in the area of author rights is low. The researchers were less concerned about transferring copyright and the ability to do certain actions with their scholarly work. The need to publish was one of the most important factors that prevent the researchers from modifying standard copyright contract. Due to low awareness, the researchers sign the publishers’ copyright contract as it is and lose all their rights to their own scholarly writing. This paper also highlights the role librarians play to assist researchers and faculty in understanding and retaining their rights to the scholarly work created.

Keywords: Author Rights; Copyright; Author Addendum; Scholarly Publishing.