Arizona State U. Libraries has a good guide to negotiating with publishers to retain rights to your work.
From the ASU Libraries guide: “Scholarly Communication: What Should Faculty Members Do?
Fortunately, you are not alone. Other professionals in research institutions acknowledge that the crisis in scholarly communication is severe enough to develop new dissemination tools for the academic community. There are a number of steps you can take that will help keep scholarly communication vital and ensure that your work is freely available for educational use at your institution .
Retain your Copyright
According to the law, copyright is granted to authors upon expressing their ideas in a “tangible form”, even if it is an unpublished manuscript; no registration is needed to become the legitimate copyright holder of your own work. As the author, you have the exclusive right to copy, distributed or perform your work, unless you give your permission to others to do so. In fact, in order to publish your article, all the publisher needs is your permission, yet standard publisher agreements transfer all your rights from you to the publisher. You don’t have to accept it, as the owner of your own intellectual property.
ASU Libraries, together with a contract specialist, offer you a toolkit to negotiate with your publisher and retain some of your rights. The Negotiating Guide takes you step by step through a typical negotiating process using clear, everyday language. It also includes a sample contract that you can copy, distribute and submit to publishers. If a publisher insists on its contract rather than accepting the sample contract above, you may want to attach an addendum that reserves rights essential to scholars in the university environment. This is a rider to the contract that is designed to ensure that the author, her colleagues, and her institution, are able to use and archive the scholarly work. Other examples of alternative agreements are available under Resources.”
Note: On July 29, 2010 at Noon in the Sequoyah Room