Copyright issues
The author of a work is normally the first owner of copyright unless the work was created by an employee in the course of their employment or other arrangements have been made with a funder or sponsor. The University of Cambridge does not assert copyright in respect of research-related materials.Copyright subsists in and protects a range of different types of works, for example: documents, reports, papers, data, letters, tables, computer programs, databases, photographs, typographical arrangements of published editions, sculptures, sound recordings, films and broadcasts.
Stating copyright when making material available online can be done by the copyright holder to manifest their consent to Open Access through using, for example, the Creative Commons licenses. Alternatively copyright holders could also compose their own licenses or permission statements and attach them to their works.
Journal articles
The main subject for Open Access publishing is the journal article. Traditionally the route is that publishers peer-review, print and circulate research articles with the authors not being financially rewarded nor disbursed. For this purpose publishers generally require authors to sign some sort of copyright transfer or license to publish agreement. With the advent of the internet and Open Access publishing this traditional relationship is being reviewed with an impact on the copyright arrangements between author and publisher.
Increasingly authors decide to either publish in Open Access journals directly or to self-archive in repositories and for that reason amend the publishing agreements to retain dissemination rights. This way the author can post an article in, for example, the institutional repository but also use it for teaching and presentation purposes. Publishing companies like Springer and Blackwell, are responding to this trend by progressively offering more open access options including allowing self-archiving of articles published in their journals.
For advice on altering copyright agreements please see the Copyright Toolbox created by JISC/SURF to "assist authors and publishers to achieve a balance between granting maximum access to a journal article and financial compensation for the publication by the publisher of this article".
For guidance on how to clear the copyright for a particular article in order to deposit in DSpace@Cambridge please refer to the DSpace@Cambridge support pages.
SHERPA/RoMEO is a database of publisher copyright and self-archiving policies.