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Copyright guide

This is a companion guide to the RMIT Copyright webpages for staff and students.

Citing and attribution

As well as being good academic practice, citation and attribution are a copyright requirement.  It is the moral right of a copyright creator to be attributed for using their work and to not have someone falsely claim to be the author.   

Cite everything! 

Attribution is required for all third-party material you use in your courses, including:

  • Creative Commons licensed works 
  • Resources from licensed databases 
  • Materials scanned from books and journals 
  • Documents and resources (text, images, video, audio etc) from the web.

The attribution should be clear and prominent and is usually located on the same page or close to the work or media object such as just under an image or embedded video. This may vary depending on your preferred referencing style. 

Referencing 

A reference list, provides the complete publication information for the sources you’ve cited. 

Be familiar with the preferred referencing style of your discipline. For information on referencing and referencing tools, see the Referencing webpage.

Academic integrity

Academic integrity means honesty and responsibility in scholarship through respecting the work of others whilst having the freedom to build new insights, new knowledge, and ideas.

Creative Commons attribution

Creative Commons attribution plays a different role to citation and referencing. To learn about the difference between citation and attribution see the heading Citation v. Attribution in the following work:

Understanding Creative Commons Licenses (chapter 7) In The OER Capability Toolkit  by RMIT University Library is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.