Authors' rights in academic publishing
As an author, you own the rights to the distribution and use of texts and other material you have produced. This is in accordance with the Copyright Act. However, in order to protect your rights when publishing we recommend that you use an author addendum.
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Rights in books and journals
When you publish texts in books or journals published by commercial publishers, the right to exclusive publication is often transferred to the publisher as soon as you sign the author agreement. You should therefore always read the text carefully before signing.
Rights that are often signed over to the publisher are:
- The right to reproduce, distribute and publicly display the article in any medium
- The right to base new works (derivatives) on the original publication
- The right to put a digital copy online on your or your employer's website
- The right to give others permission to use your publication
Remember to use author addendum
Researchers are recommended to use an author addendum together with the agreement that is signed when publishing research results. Thus, authors can retain rights not only to put the articles online, but also to reuse material, and allow other interested parties to use their material in a non-commercial context, for example for teaching. It is recommended to use author extensions from Creative Commons or SPARC.
By publishing in an open access journal, for example with a CC-BY license (or an equivalent license), this problem is avoided.
You can check most journal publishers' guidelines by searching for the title or ISSN on the Sherpa Romeo website (an aggregated overview of publishers' and journals' OA policies). Or you can check the website of the relevant publisher/journal.
Rights and research data
The same legislation applies to research data. If you choose to deposit your research data with a large commercial service provider, you risk transfering your rights to the service provider. Furthermore, you may have to pay to gain access to your own data at a later point, and if you want to carry out further research on your own data, you must also ask for permission.
How to deposit your research data and keep your rights:
We recommend that you deposit data sets e.g. in
- MF's own data archive, DataverseNO MF Norwegian School of Theology,
- at Sikt,
- or you can use an archive that has been established in your subject area and which ensures the archiving of data according to approved standards in the subject area.
If you need help finding such a subject-specific archive, you can search in the archive register re3data.
Creative Commons-licenses
Open access journals rely increasingly on Creative Commons licenses (CC licenses). These are open licenses that describe an "agreement" between the author and the user/reader. A work that is equipped with a "CC BY Attribution" license signals that the reader/user is given permission for a number of forms of use and reuse of the work, while the author retains the right to be named as the author of the work ("Attribution").
There are several CC licenses (CC BY-NC, CC BY-SA, etc.), which are used for different purposes (music, images, etc.). For the publication of research results, CC BY is most often used by the journals, since this license facilitates the greatest possible spread and sharing of knowledge, while at the same time the author's right to naming is secured.
You can read more about Creative Commons licenses at openscience.no (in Norwegian only).