Adding copyright notices to papers

Tags: research, latex, howtos

Published on
« Previous post: Using Aleph to calculate the homology of … — Next post: A brief analysis of U.S. Presidential … »

Much has been written about the sorry state of academic publishing. Luckily for me, the visualization community works with a number of publishers that are very sane, welcoming, and considerate with respect to personal copies of papers. All of them permit the free use of pre-prints on a personal website as long as it contains a text similar to the following:

Author’s Copy. Find the definitive version at example.com/doi/12345

After doing this manually for a couple of papers, I finally decided to solve it directly in LaTeX. This is what I came up with: first, you need to add \usepackage[absolute]{textpos} to the preamble of your document. Next, add the following lines:

\setlength{\TPHorizModule}{\paperwidth}
\setlength{\TPVertModule} {\paperheight}

They ensure that the subsequent calls for placing text work with respect to the current paper size. In order to place a copyright notice at the top of your paper, you only have to do the following:

\begin{textblock*}{20cm}(0.5cm,0.5cm)
  Author's copy. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
\end{textblock*}

Place this somewhere in your document, for example directly after \begin{document} and you should be good to go.

Happy publishing!