Copyright holder

The copyright holder for published research works usually sits with either the author or the publisher depending on the author/publisher agreement.

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.

Third party works

There is a requirement for the copyright holder to seek permissions to include any third-party copyright works in a publication. RMIT's Copyright Service can provide further advice.

Publisher policies

Search by journal title, ISSN or publisher to check publisher policies and for a summary of permissions to archive a version of the paper in an open access repository, including embargo conditions.

If publishing in a traditional journal, the publishing agreement will usually transfer copyright to the publisher. 

Authors 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.

Authorship and using RMIT University as your affiliation

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.