Important decisions must be made with respect to the naming of authors of the article or book. Not only must consideration be given to proper attribution of authorship, but there have also been instances where a coauthor has regarded the work as being incomplete or inferior to the extent that he or she did not want to appear as a coauthor. Publishing technical articles frequently involves a simple understanding of the terms and conditions under which the article will be published. One important consideration is whether the publisher or the author or authors will own the copyright in the published work. If the publisher is to own the rights, the author should give consideration to what reservations the author might desire to make in terms of future use of the material in other publications, reproductions of the article, and the right to make derivative works from the article.
Publishers frequently look to the sale of reprints as an additional source of income.
In general, there should be a balancing of interests dependent upon the nature of the publication, the content of the technical article, and the authors' future plans. As technical journals typically do not offer compensation to the author and the amount of time involved in generating an article is not as substantial as the creation of a book, many issues that become important in a book-publishing contract are not of great consequence in an agreement dealing with an article. One must be careful not to violate the copyrights of others when including material derived from another source. Some authors have the misconception that if they give proper credit to a prior author, there cannot be liability for copyright infringement. This is not correct.