Publish and share
- Journal articles
- Books & book chapters
- Conference publications
- Non-academic publications
- Non-traditional research outputs
- Preprints
- Protocols
- Research data
Researcher Skills Toolkit
It is important to understand your rights and obligations as an author for your published research outputs. The shift towards open access has forced the scholarly publishing world to change to allow authors to share their work more freely. This gives the author more choices and control over their work.
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Copyright ownership and author rights will be impacted by the publishing agreement you sign on submission. Key factors to consider:
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Copyright is a collection of rights intended to provide copyright owners with protection for their own material while allowing others to access it for legitimate public good. Copyright is a form of intellectual property that protects a variety of literary, artistic, musical, and dramatic works. Copyright does not protect ideas, but the form or the expression of the idea is protected.
Creative Commons provide open licences that work within copyright, enabling authors to choose how others can make use of their work. All licences include a requirement for attribution, ensuring proper acknowledgement of the author.
Some resources to assist with understanding copyright and Creative Commons include:
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There are six different Creative Commons licences for open access publishing, each allowing for different permissions around reuse. Listed from most to least permissive, these are:
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It is common for academic journals to require the author to sign a publishing agreement where the author transfers their copyright ownership in the article over to the journal publisher. This can create difficulties for making your article open access after publication.
Publishing agreements differ between publishers so always make sure you read your agreement carefully before agreeing.
You can also negotiate with your publisher to retain some of your rights by adding an addendum to your publishing agreement.
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) have developed a free, downloadable Author Addendum.
Not sure what to say to your publisher when requesting a change to your publishing agreement? The Authors Alliance is an organisation that helps authors understand and manage the rights necessary to make their works broadly available now and in the future.
They have dedicated tools and resources for authors to learn the language needed and gain understanding of their rights to request key concepts for their publishing agreement like rights reversion, reuse rights, and termination of transfer.
If your thesis contains third-party copyright material, you will need to obtain permission to include the material within your thesis.
Third party copyright includes material which is not your own work, or material which is not in the public domain (out of copyright). It may also include material which is your own work but to which you do not hold the copyright because of an agreement with a publisher or some other party.
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Copyright material includes text, music scores, computer software, film, animation, music, sound, and images (including drawings, cartoons, paintings, maps, photographs, etc.). Just because something is freely available online does not mean that it’s not covered by copyright. For more information on copyright for your digital thesis, including how to ask for reuse permission, see copyright and your digital thesis (PDF) or contact the Copyright Advisor for assistance. |
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