Once an article has been accepted into a journal and the article enters the production stages, the author enters the vast and confusing world of licences.
Publishers require authors to sign a copyright licence of some sort – both to protect the author’s work and to give the publisher the legal right to publish the article. Without the intellectual property rights, the publisher cannot publish your article, so it is important to sign and return this promptly.
But which licence are you supposed to sign? Does it change if you want to publish your article Open Access? Are you signing away your rights to your own research? This page is here to explain the different licences that you could be asked to sign by a publisher and help you figure out which one best suits your circumstances. For more information on each Licence type, please visit our ‘Licences’ webpage.
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An ‘Assignation of IPR’ (Intellectual Property Rights) form, rather than being a licence, transfers the intellectual property rights to the publisher. In summary, it confirms:
This form is suitable for anyone wishing to publish their article as paywalled content or via Green Open Access (not funded by Plan S). It is the form that we use most often at EUP, and is our standard form that we send out to contributors. You can find out more about the rights that authors retain when publishing with EUP here.
Rather than assigning the IPR to the publisher, authors can choose to licence the rights out (but maintain ownership themselves). There are two types of Licences of IPR:
Authors of creative pieces most commonly use this licence, however any author can choose to license the IPR to the publisher, rather than transfer it. This licence confirms that:
This licence is used when an article has already been published somewhere else or the rights to the work have already been assigned to someone else (usually this happens when an author has died and left the rights to someone managing their estate).
It grants all of the same protections and agreements as the exclusive licence, except that the publisher is not allowed to handle or resell the rights to reuse the content (because they are not the only press to have published it).
These licences are also suitable for anyone publishing a paywalled article or via Green Open Access, and you should opt for this licence if you have funding from Plan S to publish Green Open Access.
If publishing via Gold Open Access or if your article is being published in a Diamond/Platinum Open Access journal, there is a separate licence to sign with different terms surrounding copyright.
Open Access articles are not only free to access, they are also free to reuse and adapt. However, authors still need some kind of copyright in place to ensure that their work isn’t reused and claimed as somebody else’s original work – this type of copyright licence is called Creative Commons.
Creative Commons have six different licences available depending on what the author would like the public to be able to do with their work, however the most commonly used in academic publishing are:
You can learn more about Creative Commons and their other licences on their website.