Avoiding Copyright Infringement
When you deposit content into UDSpace or provide content to a UDSpace administrator for deposit, you are asked to make two attestations about the material that you are depositing:
- You must attest that by depositing content into UDSpace, you are not infringing upon anyone else’s copyright.
- You must attest that you have the right to grant the UD Library, Museums and Press the rights contained in the UDSpace Distribution license.
If you are unsure whether or not you have the right to deposit content to UDSpace, you can check our Copyright guide or contact Paige Morgan, Digital Publishing and Copyright Librarian.
Protecting your rights as an author and allowing others to use your work
The copyright holder of any work submitted to UDSpace retains their copyright to the work.
When you submit content to UDSpace, you are making it easier for people to find and read your work. But availability does not guarantee that work can be reused. Unless you license the content that you deposit for reuse, people will still need to ask your permission.
Licensing your work doesn’t mean giving up your copyright. A license is just explicit advanced permission for certain types of uses, i.e., you could require that your work only be used non-commercially, or require that your work be used exactly as is, with no modification.
Creative Commons provides an easy way to license your work. Creative Commons (CC) licenses are used and recognized internationally. With the exception of CC0, all Creative Commons licenses require that any use of your work is credited to you. In many cases, either the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) is a good choice for UDSpace content, but the choice depends on the goals and concerns of the author. CC0, technically a waiver and not a license, is a forfeiture of all copyrights and places the work in the public domain.
Depending on the guidelines for the community or collection that you are submitting to, you may be asked to designate a specific license for the content that you are depositing. If you are not prompted to license your work automatically, you can do so in the description field, or, if someone else is depositing work for you, ask them to include a particular license for your content. In most cases, you must license each piece of work you deposit independently — though if you submit a collection of photographs, then you may be able to designate one license for the collection.
If you have questions about the Creative Commons licenses, the Creative Commons FAQ may provide helpful information.
Creative Commons licenses are one of the most widely used licensing mechanisms — but other licenses for copyrighted content exist. Depending on what you are licensing, and what kinds of permissions and restrictions you want to include, a different license may be right for you.
Concerns about prior publications
If you are posting a paper that has or will be published in a journal, check the journal’s copyright and self-archiving policy before submitting the work to UDSpace. In many cases, you are allowed to make a version of your article openly available via an institutional repository, without paying any fee. Though the contract you sign with the journal may be difficult to understand, the Sherpa Romeo database provides an easy way to look up a journal’s policies. A common publisher requirement for posting pre-publication papers is that the record also include a link to the publisher’s version. You may also need to deposit a plain version of your final accepted manuscript, rather than the publisher’s typeset version. We can work with you to help you understand what you need to prepare to submit.