Aerospace Engineering: Author Rights

The open access article and the closed access article meet. The closed access article has never heard of the Creative Commons licences under which the open access article has been published, so the open access article has to explain what they are.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.

Our free, easy-to-use copyright licensesprovide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work — on conditions of your choice. CC licenses let you easily change your copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.”

Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable you to modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs.

Probably the quickest and easiest introduction to CC is to watch the following short video

In 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative articulated the basic tenets of Open Access for the first time. Since then, thousands of journals have adopted policies that embrace some or all of the Open Access core components related to: readership, reuse, copyright, posting, and machine readability. However, not all Open Access is created equal. For example, a policy that allows anyone to read an article for free six months after its publication is more open than a policy that creates a twelve month embargo; it is also less open than a policy that allows for free reading immediately upon publication. 

This guide will help you move beyond the seemingly simple question, “Is this journal open access?” and toward a more productive alternative, “How open is it?”

Use it to:

• Understand the components that define Open Access

• Learn what makes a journal more open vs. less open

• Make informed decisions about where to publish

Download the guide: How Open Is It?

• The author is the copyright holder. As the author of a work you are the copyright holder unless and until you transfer the copyright to someone else in a signed agreement
• Assigning your rights matters. Normally, the copyright holder possesses the exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, public performance, public display, and modification of the original work.  An author who has transferred copyright without retaining these rights must ask permission unless the use is one of the statutory exemptions in copyright law.
• The copyright holder controls the work. Decisions concerning use of the work, such as distribution, access, pricing, updates, and any use restrictions belong to the copyright holder.  Authors who have transferred their copyright without retaining any rights may not be able to place the work on course Web sites, copy it for students or colleagues, deposit the work in a public online archive, or reuse portions in a subsequent work. That’s why it is important to retain the rights you need.

For further information The SPARC Author Addendum

About SPARC

SHERPA is investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication. It is developing open-access institutional repositories in universities to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research

SHERPA Services

·         RoMEO - Publisher's copyright & archiving policies

·         JULIET - Research funders archiving mandates and guidelines

·         OpenDOAR worldwide Directory of Open Access Repositories

·         SHERPA Search - simple full-text search of UK repositories

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk