Home » Research » Library » Publishing and Open Science » Copyright & Authors Rights

Copyright and Authors Rights

It is essential for scholars to understand the copyrights and licensing implications of publishing and sharing research outputs.

Discover the opportunities of retaining your copyright, chosing openness, and applying licences to your work that enable reuse.

Staff assists you in checking which article version you can share in Open Access.

Contact [email protected] or follow the instructions below.

Retain your rights as academic author

Authors shall always try to retain more rights over the work through negotiation with the publisher. For that purpose SPARC has developed an Author Addendum that can be added to your paper at submission.

In addition, cOAlition S has announced its Rights Retention Strategy, that aims is to empower researchers funded by cOAlition S to retain control over their work. This strategy will allow authors to publish in their journal of choice, including subscription journals, while retaining the right to self-archive the author’s accepted manuscript of their papers immediately upon publication under a CC BY licence.

The European Commission, Research & Innovation published a report in 2022 on Open Science and Intellectual Property rights. It explores the inter-actions and the balance between Open Science and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). It presents the state of the art and re-flections to scope the statement 'as open as possible, as closed as necessary' in the context of an evolving and open Research and Innovation ecosystem. It also identifies recommendations for policy makers and for IPR practitioners on the promotion of Open Science and its balance with IPR for better knowledge dissemination to the benefit of all.

Which version of manuscript can be available online

Open Policy Finder (former Sherpa-Romeo)

Open Policy Finder is an online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies on a journal-by-journal basis.

Essential to know which article version you can upload in fulltext and where (personal/institutional web page, repository, etc.)

It also analyses Book Publishers' Open Access policies. Check the example of Cambridge University Press, allowing the complete book in pre-print version and a chapter if the final accepted version.

Journal Checker Tool

Journal Checker Tool enables researchers to verify compliance with their funders' Plan S-aligned Open Access policy, based on the combination of journal, funders, and the institutions affiliated with the research to be published. Currently, the tool only identifies routes to Open Access compliance for Plan S-aligned policies.

Explore the Journal Checker Tool to ensure compliance with your funders' Open Access policies.

DULCINEA

DULCINEA summaries editorial policies of Spanish journals towards open access self-archiving. To know which article version is allowed for Spanish language journals.

Licences

Creative Commons Licences

Creative Commons licenses provide an easy way to manage the copyright terms that attach automatically to all creative material under copyright. These licenses allow scholarly works to be shared and reused under terms that are flexible and legally sound.

Creative commons license spectrum between public domain (top / most permissive) and all rights reserved (bottom / most restrictive). There is CC0 with all rights granted (space of the public domain) and the core suite of six main licenses.

	CCO – No Rights Reserved	This is public domain, all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds the exclusive rights, anyone can legally use or reference those works without permission.
	CC BY – Attribution	This license lets others distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
	CC BY-SA – Attribution ShareAlike	This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.
	CC BY-ND – Attribution NoDerivatives	This license lets others reuse the work for any purpose, including commercially; however, it cannot be shared with others in adapted form, and credit must be provided to you.
	CC BY-NC – Attribution Non-Commercial	This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
	CC BY-NC-SA – Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike	This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
	CC BY-NC-ND – Attribution Non-Commercial NoDerivates	This license is the most restrictive, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

About the licenses: What our licenses do (n.d.) Creative Commons.
Available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/?lang=en (Accessed: 20 July 2023).

Page last updated on 06 March 2025