1. Scholarly work is more visible and discoverable, leveraging existing investment in institutional repositories
2. Authors or universities retain the right to make scholarly works open access and authors can benefit from a potential citation advantage
3. Increased compliance with institutional open access policies
4. Improved researcher compliance with funder open access policies
5. Clearer communication of reuse rights via consistent licensing
From the CAUL Intellectual property rights retention in scholarly works at Australian universities report, 2020.
If you retain copyright to the work in question, or it has been published under a Creative Commons licence (see below), you will be able to submit it to Pure. If you share the copyright with other authors, check with them to make sure they also approve of the work being archived and made available in the institutional repository.
If you have elected to publish in an Open Access journal your work will most likely have a Creative Commons licence attached which set by the journal, for example the Atrribution Licence CC-BY. A CC licence gives the author copyright ownership over the work and allows the work to be reproduced and distributed under the provisions of the licence. There are six main licences to choose from and once a publication is available under a CC licence this will be replicated in the repository. Visit this Creative Commons website page for further licence information and to see a range of examples.
If you have created a work for independent publication, say on a blog, the output and the blog itself can be licensed. See this page which steps you through the process of choosing a CC licence to meet your requirements.
Please contact the Manager, Scholarly Publications & Copyright if you would like to discuss licensing your academic output.
If you don’t retain copyright, but have transferred your rights to your publisher, you may still be able to deposit a version of your paper in Pure. You may like to check your publisher's copyright policy to determine what is allowed to be submitted to an institutional repository.
It is helpful to know the copyright status of your work before submitting it to Pure, but the Scholarly Publications team can provide assistance in determining the copyright status of your work and complying with publishers’ copyright restrictions.
It is sometimes possible to negotiate with publishers to retain some or all of your publishing and open access rights. At the very least, you should try to retain the right to self-archive a copy of your work an institutional repository by using an addendum to the Publishing Agreement.
An author's addendum is a legal document that modifies the publisher's agreement and allows authors to keep rights to their work. Listed below are some free resources which can help authors negotiate contract terms with publishers:
Establishing a unique author/researcher identity is an important step to improving your research visibility and impact. There are a variety of options for creating a unique identity, with ORCID being the latest development. ORCID is well supported by many publishers.
ORCID is a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers and an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other current author ID schemes which includes:
SPARC provides useful information about author rights.
Check the SPARC Author Addendum for better understanding
of OA authorship.
SPARC have released this two-minute video to help authors on the topic of author rights. The video explains in simple terms the potential for wider exposure of scholarly articles when authors retain key rights.
