When publishing in an Open Access journal, as author you will generally retain most or all rights to the work.
However, if publishing in a traditional journal the publishing agreement will usually transfer copyright to the publisher.
Authors can try to negotiate with the publisher to retain some rights by adding an addendum to the agreement, for example to allow them to deposit a version of the article in an institutional repository for open access.
The SPARC Author Addendum is a document that you can use to legally modify your publisher's contract so you can retain the rights you need to both promote your research publications and achieve your scholarly goals. The Addendum will allow you to publish an accepted manuscript version of your publication in the RMIT Research Repository.