To avoid a conflicting transfer of copyright to the publisher and to protect yourself from breach of contract, you can use the addendum generator to prepare an "author addendum" to attach to the agreement with a publisher. Even without the attachment of an addendum, however, the license to Harvard will still have force unless it is waived for a particular article.

Each school's open access policy operates automatically to give the University a nonexclusive license in any scholarly articles a faculty member completes after its adoption. This is true for both existing and later-hired faculty members

Publishers' agreements concerning publication of articles often contain provisions that are inconsistent with the prior license granted to Harvard under the Open Access Policy.

For instance, a publisher's agreement may specify that you transfer all copyright in the article to the publisher and that you warrant that there are no prior licenses. The existence of the prior license to Harvard means that this warranty is not true. If you sign the publication agreement without an appropriate amendment, you may be in breach of the agreement.