Copyright and Open Access

Copyright in the context of open access is different to general copyright in that terms and conditions and vary dramatically from publisher to publisher, and even from journal to journal from the same publisher.

This section will provide information about copyright in relation to open access publishing. For general copyright guidance, see our Help Guide on Copyright.

Ensuring compliancy with copyright when depositing your research

There are a number of ways in which you can ensure that your open access deposits comply with copyright terms and conditions:

• Get into the habit of checking the SHERPA Services website for terms and conditions of the journals in question.
• Retain your Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM). This is the unformatted, Word version of your accepted article. Many publishers, from large to small, allow these to be deposited in repositories such as UBIR.
• When publishing, you may be asked to sign a Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA). The CTA passes copyright of your intellectual output from you to your publisher and may restrict how you later reuse or share your research, including making it open access. Therefore, you may wish to consider offering the publisher a publication agreement whereby you can retain the copyright of your work.
• True open access does allow for you to retain your copyright, and many open access articles are published under a Creative Commons licence. The most commonly used is a CC-BY licence, which allows research to be shared and reused as long as it is appropriately attributed.
• Other Creative Commons licences can also be used; consider which one might be most appropriate for your needs. The Choose a Licence tool from Creative Commons may help you make an appropriate choice. 

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