Your Author Accepted Manuscript is your intellectual creation. Don't give it away!
Normally, you would lose the right to disseminate your Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) during your publication journey. Although you automatically hold the copyright when you write a paper, if you publish it via a subscription journal or in a book that is not Open Access (OA), you may be asked to sign a publishing agreement in which you give all or part of your rights to the publisher, who now holds them in exclusivity.
In practice, this means that you cannot use your own work without explicit written permission from the publisher. For example, you cannot use any of your content on Wikipedia, translate your own work into another language or another format such as Braille, distribute a copy of your work through a repository from the day of first publication, or share your work with colleagues by uploading it to an academic social networking site such as Academia.edu or ResearchGate. Conversely, a publisher can do all of these things without first seeking your permission, and more: they can re-package your content for use by other providers, including commercial ones, and they can alter or reformat your manuscript (e.g. include your work in an anthology) as well as sub-licence all or any rights they choose to anyone else.
In short, if you transfer or grant exclusive rights to a publisher, they can use your work without asking, whereas you, the author and creator, may be unable to make similar use of your own intellectual content.
A CC BY licence means that other researchers, students, and interested parties can include a figure, table, photograph or other materials from your article or chapter for any purpose in their own work without having to obtain any additional permission, as long as they acknowledge and link to the original source, you as the original creator and to the licence deed. For recommended practices of attributing CC Licensed works please see wiki.creativecommons.org. Releasing your work under a Creative Commons licence is important, otherwise anyone who wants to reuse your work will always need the copyright owner’s explicit permission, unless it is ‘fair dealing’ under copyright law (i.e. limited reuse of copyright material for certain fixed purposes, such as ‘criticism and review’). Your work is not truly OA without a liberal re-use licence, and research funders are increasingly requiring the distribution of scholarly works under a CC BY licence. For more information about Creative Commons licensing, please consult the Copyright LibGuide.
The RR mechanism the University of Derby is adopting is tried and tested. Harvard University in the US has been using it since 2008 and across the UK an increasing number of universities, for example, Edinburgh, Cambridge and Sheffield Hallam have implemented similar RR mechanisms as the University of Derby. It is expected that other UK universities will follow. The University of Derby is the first post '92 institution in the Midlands to implement it other than as a trial. For a full list of institutions that have implemented RR, see the UK Institutional RR Policies tab of this Guide.
The Library is here to fully support you and will provide all the guidance you need to achieve the benefits that the revised Research Publication and OA policy promises. We provide a full set of FAQs which cover all the questions you might have which you can find on this Guide. We also deliver a range of online information sessions including one which is dedicated to RR. You can watch a recording of the latest one below. Why not browse our events calendar to see what's coming up!
This video is a recording of a workshop delivered by the Publication Practice Librarian and the University's Copyright Officer. It covers what RR is, your rights as an author or creator and how to ensure that you maintain control over your creative output as opposed to the publisher! It also considers how to utilise RR and creative commons licensing, covering publisher agreements and services and offer guidance on how to comply with funder requirements around RR. This session predominantly centres on traditional output types such as journal articles, and conference proceeding papers etc and should appeal to research active members of staff and research active students that are actively producing publications.