Managing your copyright

Managing the copyright of your research outputs is critical to maximise the benefits of publicly funded research and to ensure you and the university have the right to use the work for further dissemination and for teaching.

Before an article is submitted to a journal for peer review the copyright belongs to the author/s or to the university or employer/s. See more about copyright ownership.

Publishing agreements and licences

Authors sign a contract or agreement with publishers which gives the publisher the right to publish the article and charge a subscription fee for access. Many publishers offer authors the option of paying a 'article processing charge' (APC) in exchange for publishing the article open access immediately, with no embargo period. Open access options range from only 'free to read' to openly licenced which permit redistribution and potential reuse depending on the chosen licence.

Publishing agreements may require you to assign your copyright to the publisher. Assigning your copyright means that you cannot reuse your own work without explicit permission from the publisher. For example, submitting it to CRO for immediate open access, sharing it in scholarly collaboration networks, including it in a thesis by prior publication, reproducing it in course content. Conversely the publisher could reuse the work in any way without your permission, for example: sell it to an AI developer; include it in an anthology or textbook; sell a translation; sub-licence it to another provider.

Publishing agreements sometimes allow the author to retain copyright, but give the publisher an exclusive licence to reuse the work. Depending on the license terms, an exclusive licence may be not much better than assigning copyright.

Consider claiming rights retention before submitting an article.

Reading and understanding publishing agreements

In most publisher agreements you will find the term “exclusive licence”.

If you retain copyright but grant a publisher an exclusive licence to certain rights, then only the publisher can exercise those rights. Anyone else will need to ask permission from the publisher.

An example of an unreasonable exclusive licence:

"© The Author, under exclusive license to ABC Publisher. The Author hereby grants and licenses to ABC Publisher the exclusive, sole, permanent, world-wide, transferable, sub-licensable and unlimited right to reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, make available or otherwise communicate to the public, translate, publicly perform, archive, store, lease or lend and sell the Work or parts thereof individually or together with other works in any language, in all revisions and versions."

This agreement is unreasonable because:

  • The author is left with no rights to reuse the work, even for teaching or including in a thesis
  • The author cannot give permission for someone else to reuse the work
  • The publisher has the right to sell the work to third parties or to use it for any purpose without asking the author.

A more reasonable exclusive licence could give the publisher the exclusive right to publish the final work in their journal, but give the author the rights to:

  • deposit their peer reviewed accepted manuscript in CRO
  • give copies of the work to colleagues or their students
  • reuse the work in derivative works or in a thesis by a publication
  • reuse illustrations or charts in other work and conference presentations

A time limit or embargo period is also more reasonable than granting the publisher a permanent or “life of copyright” licence.

A non-exclusive licence means that the licensor may give the same or similar rights to multiple parties. For example:

  • If an author grants a non-exclusive license to a publisher to publish their work, then the author is free to publish the work, or part of it, with another publisher. There may be qualifiers such as right to first publication.
  • Creative Commons licences are non-exclusive. All users have the same rights.
  • Subscription agreements are non-exclusive. The publisher can sell a subscription to any number of subscribers.

Publishers frequently require authors to accept click-through agreements assigning copyright or agreeing to exclusive licences upon submission of a paper. This may make the submission process quicker, but can limit the options for negotiation.

  • Read the terms carefully before ticking the box in a click through agreement.
  • Download and save a copy of the agreement for future reference.

If you are not comfortable with the terms, negotiate via email before agreeing. Keep copies of all correspondence.

Self-archiving, also called green open access means depositing a copy of your publication in an institutional repository.

Charles Sturt institutional repository is CRO. The Research Policy requires all research outputs and HDR theses to be submitted to CRO.

Jisc Open policy finder (formerly Sherpa Services) provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies on a journal-by-journal basis

Rights retention means you retain copyright ownership and apply an open licence to the work thereby giving you more control over how your work can be used and distributed in the future.

Copyright protection is automatic and applies to any work as soon as it is written down. Authors/s (or the university if you are staff) therefore own the copyright in a preprint manuscript. By applying a Creative Commons licence to your manuscript, you retain the right to reuse it without an embargo or payment of an APC.

Notify the publisher of your intention by including the following rights retention statement with the cover letter before submitting a preprint to a journal.

For the purposes of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

Rights retention policies have been adopted by many research organisations and universities worldwide. Examples include:

NHMRC Open Access Policy (September 2022) requires all publications supported in whole or in part by NHMRC to have a CC-BY licence and be open access with no publisher embargo period. The following statement is required if your funder is NHRMC.

This research was funded in whole or part by [INSERT Funder name*] [INSERT Grant number]. For the purposes of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

Checklist for reviewing publisher agreements

Review the publishers’ or journals’ policy or “information for authors” webpage/s. Check the following before accepting an agreement. Does the publisher:

  • support self-archiving or green open access?
  • provide a copy of your accepted manuscript for self-archiving?
  • require an embargo period before open access?
  • charge a fair and reasonable APC for gold open access?
  • prohibit or limit your choice of open licences on any version of the manuscript?
  • limit future reuse of the work in other publications such as OER?
  • allow reuse of figures, diagrams, tables or data in other publications such as conference presentations or OER?
  • allow copies of the work to be used course content?
  • allow you to include the work in a thesis by publication?
  • prevent or inhibit your compliance with funding or institutional open access mandates?
  • provide a copy of your agreement for your records and future reference?

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, have a free, downloadable Author Addendum for altering publisher agreements.

See Author Rights: Using the SPARC Author Addendum.

Publisher agreements and CRO

The Charles Sturt Research Policy requires outputs deposited in CRO to be open access, except where restricted by agreements with publishers, or to protect privacy, culturally sensitive information, or national security.

When you submit your research output to CRO, the library will check publisher conditions before authorising open access. Open access is not allowed if:

  • the publisher owns the copyright or holds an exclusive licence to the work, and
  • their policy does not permit open access through self-archiving, or
  • the work is subject to an embargo period.

See CRO Charles Sturt Research Output

More information on publishing

Where to publish guide

Open access publishing guide

Watch 'Publishing your research: open access'