All Concerned, First, the background: While attending college I submitted a short story and a poem for publication in an Arts/Lit college expo magazine. Both were accepted, and published (hooray). I unfortunately lost my copy of the magazine in which it was published, and the original hard copy draft as well, in a house fire in 1997. I'm interested in dusting both works off and thus my two questions: One - do I retain the rights to these works or did I surrender them upon acceptance by the college for publication? Two - do these college departments typically keep the master archived someplace? My originals are flat out gone. What I'd be reduced to doing is verifying my identity to the school and copying my own work out of the magazine so that I could revise/edit/update and hopefully submit for 'real' publication. Any guidance will be most welcome!
Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :
Can you access the college library catalog to see if they have a copy? Does the college still produce that publication?
Whether you own the rights depends on what kind of agreement you had with the publication, and you might be able to find that by contacting the college.
Surely someone there would be willing to help you track this information down. I'd check with the library. Librarians are pros at finding things out.
Posted by Pyre Dynasty (Member # 1947) on :
Having worked on such a publication I think you have a pretty good chance. They tend not to throw anything away. In our office we had some piles of submissions from years ago. You probably used up first publication rights, but the circulation may have been so low that it doesn't even count for that. You would probably have to check, but you would have had to have signed a pretty specific contract to give up your copyright altogether.
I'm sure there is a copy floating around somewhere. I suggest going to the department that produced the publication. (Probably an english department.) Even if they don't have an archive there may be an old professor that has a copy collecting dust on a shelf.