Digital Commons @ Harrisburg University

You must retain the rights to your own work in order to give permission for it to be published in Digital Commons or elsewhere. Typically the creator of the work retains the rights to publish and distribute the work with or without a legal declaration. This page will help you confirm distribution rights of your work.

Posting a document to Digital Commons does not change your copyright ownership. However, if you are planning to post a work that has already been published elsewhere, such as in a journal, book, or conference proceedings, please be sure you have re-distribution rights to the work.

To post your work to Digital Commons, you must submit a Submission Agreement along with your manuscript, which asks you to confirm you distribution rights to the work.

Page Contents:

• Copyright and Publishing Permissions
• Creative Commons Licensing

Copyright and Publishing Permissions
While the creator of a work usually retains the rights to publish and distribute the work with or without a legal declaration, in some cases, copyright permissions may be turned over to another entity. Copyright is a legal form of intellectual property protection for authors, covering both published and unpublished works.

Before your work can be posted to Digital Commons, you must submit a Submission Agreement along with your manuscript affirming that you have distribution rights to the work. You may not have the rights to post or provide permission to post your work to Digital Commons if:

• You have already published the work as a journal article, book, or book chapter, or are under contract to do so with an academic or for-profit publisher, although many publishers allow pre-prints to be posted in institutional repositories such as Digital Commons;
• You intend to try to publish your work in its existing form (i.e. without major revisions) in a book or journal with an academic or for-profit publisher and do not know whether the publishers you are approaching will allow for pre-prints to be posted in institutional repositories such as Digital Commons.

Most publishers post guidelines about institutional repositories on their websites and will inform you of you of your distribution rights when you sign a publishing agreement.

If you would like to try to publish your work in an academic or for-profit journal in the future but are required to upload your work to Digital Commons, you can prevent your work from appearing publicly for up to three years when you submit it. This is called an embargo period. If you get a publication contract, and the publisher allows for pre-prints to be posted to a repository such as Digital Commons (many do), you can then end the embargo. If a publisher does restrict pre-prints, you can request to have your work removed from Digital Commons.

Creative Commons Licensing
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that "helps you legally share your knowledge and creativity to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world."  A Creative Commons (CC) license allows you to publish your work open access, meaning it is available at no charge. The different licenses define what users of your work are allowed to do (and not do) with your work, such as copying, distributing, editing, remixing, and building upon your original work.

Types of Creative Commons licensing: