Copyright applies to open access publishing.
For copyright advice contact the Copyright team directly: copyright@rmit.edu.au
Authorship is attributed when an individual has made a significant intellectual or scholarly contribution to the research. It is a key element of research integrity. Significance of a contribution is an academic judgment and will depend on the practices of your research discipline. Refer to the Authorship page within the RMIT Research Portal for more information.
To ensure that RMIT can include your publication (if it meets the eligibility criteria) as a research or scholarly work, it is important that RMIT University is used as the affiliation on the submitted publication. Refer to the RMIT Authorship of Research Outputs Procedure.
The Australasian Open Access Strategy Group provides advice on the copyright implications of open access and the retention of copyright.
When publishing in an open access journal, as an author you may retain copyright. However, some open access publishing agreements may allow you to retain copyright but ask that you assign certain rights to the publisher. Read your publishing agreement carefully and get legal advice to ensure you understand what rights you are retaining and whether you are assigning some rights to the publisher.
Search Open Policy Finder to check publisher policies and permissions outlined in your publishing contract, including embargo conditions, for depositing in an institutional repository such as the RMIT Research repository.
If publishing in a traditional journal, the publishing agreement will usually transfer copyright to the publisher.
As an author, you can try to negotiate with the publisher to retain some rights by adding an addendum to the agreement, for example to allow them to deposit a version of the article in an institutional repository for open access.
The SPARC Author Addendum is a document that you can use to legally modify your publisher's contract so you can retain the rights you need to both promote your research publications and achieve your scholarly goals. The Addendum will allow you to deposit an accepted manuscript version of your publication in the RMIT Research Repository.
As a creator of a non-traditional research output, you are unlikely to publish with a traditional publishing house and will instead be self-publishing via the RMIT Research Repository.
You are authorised to apply a Creative Commons re-use license to your outputs. When applying the Creative Commons licence, you have more options than the commonly used licenses used for traditional open access output types. If you are a co-author of the output
Check the terms of any funding you have received. Grants may, for example, require a CC BY or another CC licence be applied. See the section in this guide about ARC and NHMRC mandates.
Think carefully about how you would like your research to be shared or reused. You may choose, for example, to allow commercial reuse, or to restrict adaptation of your work.
Where authors have worked as a multi-institutional group or with other co-authors, all parties must be in agreement on the Creative Commons re-use licence chosen to apply to the work. This should be discussed when drawing up your research contract. More information can be found on the Submission Essentials page.
Note: If your NTRO/Creative Work incorporates music, text, diagrams, or images or other material where the copyright is owned by another organisation or individual, a Creative Commons re-use licence cannot be applied. In this situation, the ‘All Rights Reserved’ license should be applied.
This Library guide by RMIT University Library is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence, except where otherwise noted. All reasonable efforts have been made to clearly label material where the copyright is owned by a third party and ensure that the copyright owner has consented to this material being presented in this library guide. The RMIT University logo is ‘all rights reserved’.