Publishers generally require authors to sign some sort of copyright transfer agreement or license to publish agreement prior to the publication of material. These agreements vary between publishers. Before starting the deposit process, please investigate if the publisher allows deposit of a copy into an institutional repository, this is also called self-archiving.  Copyright clearance can be done in various ways depending on the content type.

Scientific papers

78 % of scientific publishers currently allow self-archiving of articles published in their journals. In order to clear the copyright for a particular scientific article you can use three main sources of information:

• Look up the publisher or journal policy in the SHERPA/ROMEO database.
• Look up the publishers own web site. Often publisher policies for self-archiving are described in the Author guidelines. For example Elsevier's Journal authors' home.
• Keep the Copyright transfer agreement that you signed, for newer articles self-archiving policies will be included in the agreement. Here is an example licence from Nature Publishing Group.

Please note that most publishers only permit authors to deposit their final draft post refereeing and not the publisher pdf version. Explanation of different versions. If you have difficulties please contact the DSpace@Cambridge Support and Liaison officer Barbara Bültmann.

Books

Have you published a book that you also wish to deposit in digital form into DSpace@Cambridge? Unless you at the time of publishing have retained rights to deposit a digital copy into DSpace@Cambridge you will have to contact the publisher in order to seek permission for this deposit.

For copyright clearance for other types of content please contact us.

Retaining rights

If you are in the process of publishing your article with a journal publisher it is also possible to retain rights allowing you to place your paper in DSpace@Cambridge.

Some academic authors believe it was necessary to transfer copyright to the publisher when publishing a scientific article. This however, is not the case. Copyright is something that lies with the author. The author can choose to transfer the copyright to the publisher, but this often restricts him/her in future use of the work, for example for teaching purposes. Alternatively, the author can authorize the publisher to publish his/her work by using a licence. With this licence a publisher can publish as usual and if necessary still take measures against illegal copy making. For the author a licence means that he/she retains the right to publish his work somewhere else, for example freely accessible on the internet, or on a department’s website, or an improved version in a different medium.

Short film (2.5 minutes) on Author rights, your rights. This film was produced by SURFdirect, SURF’s digital rights expert community starring Dirk Visser, Professor of intellectual property law at Leiden University and Martijn Katan, Professor of Nutrition at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Some publishers already allow self-archiving in repositories; for example, Elsevier and Blackwell.  Read the publisher’s agreement you are asked to sign carefully. In case it does not refer to depositing in repositories discuss with the publisher a possible amendment of the existing agreement or using an alternative one. For help and advice on model agreements see the Copyright Toolbox.