Licences
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.
Jump straight to:
Assignation of IPR
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:
- That the author’s work hasn’t been published before and they have obtained the rights to reuse any content that is not their original work.
- That the publisher will hold the intellectual property rights for the article and the right to manage any reuse of the article’s content.
- Any rights the author will retain to the version of the article first submitted to the journal and the version that the journal accepted after any revisions were made during peer review.
- Whether the author retains the right to reuse and repurpose their own content into other published works, e.g. book chapters (provided that the reuse doesn’t directly compete with the original article).
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.
Licences of IPR
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:
Exclusive Licence 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:
- The author’s work hasn’t been published before and they have obtained the rights to reuse any content that is not their original work.
- The author grants permission for the publisher (and only that publisher) to publish and distribute their article.
- The publisher will be able to sell and manage the rights to reuse and repurpose the article.
- The author can upload their Accepted Manuscript to an Open Access repository at any time after publication under an Open Access licence (which protects that version against copyright infringement).
Non-Exclusive Licence of IPR
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 Licences (Creative Commons Licences)
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:
- CC-BY: This licence allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The licence also allows the material to be reused commercially.
- CC-BY-NC: This licence allows reuse for non-commercial purposes only. As long as the material isn’t reused to make money, it has the same freedoms as the CC-BY licence.
- CC-BY-NC-ND: This licence is the most restrictive of the six, only allowing others to download your work and share them with others as long as they credit you. They cannot change them in any way or use them commercially.
You can learn more about Creative Commons and their other licences on their website.
Where to now?
- Back: Open Access
- Return to the ECR Hub homepage
- Ready to submit your article? Find the full list of Edinburgh University Press journals that you can submit to here
