AMS Copyright Policy

The American Mathematical Society (AMS), founded in 1888 to further the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, advocacy and other programs. The AMS upholds very flexible copyright policies for the books and articles it publishes and strives to promote wide access to its publications while preserving the integrity of the originally published works.

1. Consent to Publish and Copyright

Authors must grant the AMS specific permission to publish their work (i.e., a formal "consent to publish"). This is a legal requirement that arises in part from provisions of U.S. copyright law. Authors are encouraged, but not required, to transfer copyright to their work to the AMS. In doing so, authors are able to retain rights to use their work for their own purposes, and the AMS is able to maintain the integrity of the work's original publication by administrating legal rights and permissions processes on the author's behalf.

For authors of papers accepted for publication in AMS research and member journals and proceedings volumes, a Consent to Publish and Copyright Agreement Form must be completed prior to publication. With this agreement, authors may choose to transfer copyright to the AMS, to retain copyright, and/or choose to dedicate their work to the public domain 28 years following publication (see Section 6).

Authors of AMS books complete formal contracts for the publication of their work with the AMS and may also choose to retain copyright.

Creative Commons Licenses

Articles published in AMS's "gold" open access journals: Proceedings of the AMS, Series B and Transactions of the AMS, Series B will be distributed under the terms of either the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License(CC BY-NC 3.0) or the Creative Commons Attribution License(CC BY 3.0). Under both CC BY-NC and CC BY, authors retain copyright to their articles and are required to select a license before an article moves into the production stage.

Electronic-only Publications

For articles that will appear exclusively in electronic format, the AMS will register copyright with the Library of Congress on behalf of the copyright holder.

Author's Use

Information on the ways authors of articles may continue to use their works following publication by the AMS may be found in Section 4 of the Consent to Publish and Copyright Agreement Form and on the AMS Open Access Journals webpage. Authors of AMS books should consult their Acquisitions Editor with any questions regarding reuse of their work.

The following is a summary of AMS's author-use policies for journal and proceedings articles:

• An author's draft version of the work, either before or after peer review, may be reproduced (under license no less restrictive than the CC BY-NC-ND Creative Commons License) by any means for educational and scientific purposes by the author(s). This means that the pre-publication draft of the work may be posted on the author's personal website, contributed to the author's institutional repository, and/or posted on pre-print servers such as arXiv.org, all provided that no commercial use of the material is made (no fees may be charged for access to or use of the material) and no derivative works are included.

• Authors are also permitted to use part or all of their works published in AMS journals and proceedings volumes in their future publications, provided that the AMS-published work is not made available in any way on a standalone basis. This includes use of the work as part of theses and as part of other new works published with other publishers; however, it does not include posting the published version of the work on a website or in any capacity in which it is not included as a part of a new work. In any and all such reproductions by the author(s) or the author's licensees, AMS's original publication of the work must be credited in the following manner: "First published in [Publication] in [volume/issue number and year], published by the American Mathematical Society," and the copyright notice in proper form must be placed on all copies.

Citation examples:

• A paper first published in an AMS journal where the copyright was transferred to AMS should be credited in the following manner:
  • First published in Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 63 (April 2016), published by the American Mathematical Society. © 2016 American Mathematical Society.
• A paper first published in an AMS journal where the author(s) retained copyright should be credited in the following manner:
  • First published in Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 63 (April 2016), published by the American Mathematical Society. © 2016 by [author(s) name(s)].

2. Author's use of Third-Party Material in AMS Works

Authors of AMS-published works are responsible for obtaining permission for the use of any and all material (such as graphics, photographs and text) in their work that comes from another source. Authors should use the AMS's Permission Form to request permission from the rights owner for material previously published or under copyright by another person or organization. Permissions for all such third-party material must be obtained for all editions of the work (current and future), in both print and electronic formats, and must be free of any restrictions which may limit the AMS's ability for itself or through licensees to produce, publish, promote and distribute the work in any territory, any language, and any medium now known or hereafter discovered. Any permissions which include restrictions will likely result in the material being omitted from the work.

If applying for permission using an online form or through email, AMS's requirements as stated above must be matched as closely as possible, and the AMS must be provided with formal written confirmation of the grant of such permissions in order for the material to be included in the published version of the work.

Please reference the U.S. Copyright Office website for information and FAQs about U.S. copyright laws.

3. AMS Journals - "Early View" and Version of Record

Articles in Early View are made available to AMS members for online viewing prior to being published in a journal issue. Such articles are made available and tagged with a DOI immediately upon acceptance by the journal's editorial board after undergoing peer review and before copyediting.After copyediting, author proofing, and final paging, these papers will appear in their final form (i.e., the Version of Record) as a "Recently Published Article" before appearing in a published journal issue. The following journals are included in the Early View system:

• Journal of the American Mathematical Society
• Mathematics of Computation
• Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society
• Transactions of the American Mathematical Society

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Please reference the U.S. Copyright Office website for general information and FAQs about U.S. copyright laws.