Publishing

You automatically hold copyright over any intellectual property that you create. You don't have to even write a little "c" with a circle around it next to your name on the paper, it belongs to you.

Copyright means that anyone who wants to re-use or distribute copies of your work will need to contact you to get permission first.

If you want to submit your work to UND's Scholarly Commons institutional repository:

• We recommend that you apply a Creative Commons license to your work. A traditional Copyright license will require others to contact you for permission before they may legally distribute copies or re-use any part of your work. A Creative Commons license will allow you to communicate to your readers ahead of time how you'd like your work to be re-used.

  • There are 6 types of Creative Commons licenses, but we prefer the CC-BY license to allow for the widest re-use of information:

CC BY: “This license lets others distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.”

For more information on the licenses, contact your librarian, or see the CreativeCommons.org website page: “About the Licenses.”

If you have submitted your work to a journal to be published:

• If you have published your work elsewhere, you most likely signed over your rights of ownership to whatever body published your work.

• Most publishers do allow pre-prints or rough drafts of work they publish to be posted on institutional repositories, and you can check most journal's policies about posting pre-prints on a database called SHERPA/RoMEO.

If you created your work at the explicit direction of UND:

• UND has a very generous intellectual property policy which allows for its employees to retain ownership over most of the products of their scholarship. However, it is possible that your work may actually be the property of UND if you created it at the explicit request of your supervisor, department, or other UND body. Check with UND counsel if you have questions.

Unlike traditional copyright, Creative Commons licenses allow the creator of a work to assign a license which allows for specific kinds of reuses of that work.

To license your work with a Creative Commons license, simply place a statement somewhere on your work specifying what type of Creative Commons license it has, and link back to the Creative Commons.org website so that readers can view a copy of the license.

• There are 6 types of Creative Commons licenses, but we recommend the "CC-BY" license to allow for the widest possible re-use of information:

CC BY: “This license lets others distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.”

All you need to do to assign a Creative Commons license to your work is to place a statement to that effect somewhere on the work. See the tab at left "Licensing your work as Creative Commons", or the Creative Commons Organization's website for more information.