How do you, as an author, take control of your own intellectual property? What criteria should you keep in mind when evaluating a journal for the submission of your work? This editorial discusses the answers to these questions, with an emphasis on an open access environment where a publication’s quality might be harder to define. It also offers tips for negotiating your rights, as an author, over your intellectual property. Numeracy authors publish under a Creative Commons license, so we will explain what that means and why Numeracy’s newly-added Publication Ethics & Malpractice Statement is important.