Navigating copyright and licensing in open research
Imagine: you’ve submitted an article to a journal, and, after a few minor tweaks and changes, it’s been accepted. Congratulations!
After diligently creating a record and depositing your accepted manuscript in Pure (as we ask all researchers to do), you get a message from the publisher: they need you to fill out your copyright and licensing agreement. In it, you find a bunch of legal language, things you’ve seen but maybe not engaged with, words that have always sat on the periphery and never fully understood.
Maybe this scenario isn’t so hard to imagine. Maybe you’ve been in this situation before.
The Open Access team has received many enquiries about copyright and, in particular, licensing. We ourselves have emailed authors about their own licensing choices, particularly as they relate to funder and institutional compliance.
Copyright and licensing are tricky to navigate sometimes. While the University has many policies, including our intellectual property (IP) and open access (OA) policies, that may answer some of these questions, these sometimes take time to parse.
As such, the Open Access team has put together a few resources recently that might help you as you explore your options when it comes to copyrighting and licensing your research material.
Video: Open access, copyright, and licensing
First, we developed the following video to give a good foundation on many of the issues, questions, and general knowledge surrounding copyright and licensing in open research.
This video summarises details from our IP and OA policies and our copyright web page. It explores what rights are retained, who has copyright when engaging with a publisher, what the various conditions are involved in Creative Commons licensing, and what to consider when including third-party images and other materials.
We hope this is a helpful resource that folks can watch and come back to whenever they are trying to understand this complicated information.
If your questions aren’t answered here, and you have other open access-related questions, please contact us at [email protected].