Copyright and academic publishing, particularly in the digital world, is a complex issue of information literacy. Technology, policies, and ethical standards continue to evolve as the copyright debate does, and the gray areas digital copyright widen. We’ve found some useful links and articles that can help you demystify issues surrounding copyright and digital publishing.
The ‘Doctoral Writing’ blog’s post Copyright: Thesis Responsibilities explains the required copyright consent once a thesis is posted into a digital portal, and how to obtain permissions. Their follow-up post Doctoral Theses Online When Copyright Permission Is Not Required explains the situations when copyright permission is not needed. From the Research Whisperer Blog (just like the Thesis Whisperer – but with more money, reads their tagline), a helpful series on the whys and wherefores of data publishing: Tattoo your data, Publishing your data: the ethics question, Publishing your data: the licensing issue.
LSE’s ‘The Impact Blog’, which focuses on maximizing the impact of academic research, explores open access, creative commons and copyright in two feature length posts. In Open access and Creative Commons licensing: copyrights, moral rights and moral panic, Anne Barron addresses the uncertainty over copyright and open licensing in relation to academic research outputs by disentangling the four regimes of authors’ rights. Glyn Moody says that the heart of the debate on open access to research is over licensing, draws on the lessons learned from the software debate and pulls apart the key areas of division for the research community in his article Open Access definitions vary but authors must be reminded that giving up copyright is just folly.
Here at Concordia, the Copyright Guide for Thesis Preparation provides information for graduate students about copyright in the preparation of a thesis or dissertation, discussing the use of copyrighted material in a thesis as well as copyright issues related to electronic deposit of theses at Concordia University. Both this Guide and The Concordia University Libraries Copyright Guide provide general information about copyright to assist you, though the University warns that neither guide is intended to be and cannot be construed as legal advice. You can also consult Concordia’s Policy on Copyright Compliance (SG-2).