The aim of this guide is to provide copyright awareness and education in the following areas:
It does not constitute legal advice. For legal advice, please contact your legal counsel or the Office of Legal Affairs through your department.
You may encounter copyright issues as you publish your work such as:
This page contains information to guide you on some of your options.
For more information on Scholarly Communications and Publishing, please refer to the Library Guide on Scholarly Communications.
Do You Own Copyright?
Depending on the terms governing your research, copyright in your research manuscript might be owned by you, by NUS, or by the body funding your research.
You are ... | Governing Terms | Who Owns Copyright Before Publication? |
an NUS Student |
NUS IP Policy Clause F(3); |
You own the copyright in your academic thesis and dissertations but you may not own:
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an NUS Employee |
NUS IP Policy Clause F(2); and the terms of your employment contract |
You may not own copyright in the manuscript in these situations:
You own copyright in the manuscript if none of the above situations describe yours. |
If you own the copyright, it means that you have the exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, display and modify your manuscript.
Overview of Author-Publisher Agreement
When publishing your manuscript, you will have to sign an Author-Publisher agreement.
The Author-Publisher agreement may have different permutations.
We list below examples from most to least restrictive of Author rights:
Retaining Your Rights
Are there options that will allow you to retain your rights?
The answer is yes. Here are your options.
Options | What might be helpful? | How will it help? |
Check if a publisher has self-archiving friendly agreements |
Publishers have different policies regarding self-archiving and use of your published manuscript. The Sherpa Romeo database allows you to check publishers’ policies on copyright and self-archiving. Before submitting your manuscript to a publisher, you may want to check this database to determine how you can use your manuscript before and after publication. For instance, you can find out whether the publisher allows you to upload your manuscript in a pre-print and/or post-print version in an open access repository such as ScholarBank@NUS. |
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Modify the publication agreement to allow you to retain certain rights |
SPARC |
In most Author-Publisher agreements, copyright is vested in the publisher rather than the author. A restrictive Author-Publisher agreement would limit access to your manuscript if you wish to archive your publications online. SPARC is based on US law and drafted by US lawyers, so it might not be fully applicable to the local context. For detailed advice on this, please approach the NUS Office of Legal Affairs. |
Use an alternative agreement or publish in an open access journal that uses creative commons licenses | Creative Commons |
You might wish to seek options to incorporate different licensing arrangements to govern the publication of your article. Creative Commons licenses can be used to provide you with the ability to deal with your manuscript after publication. You might wish to seek OLA’s advice to incorporate the Creative Commons licensing arrangement into the traditional Author-Publisher agreement. You might also wish to publish in a journal which implements Creative Commons licenses. Example of a license which incorporates creative commons here. |
Sometimes, you may wish to re-use material from other scholarly works, such as figures or diagrams.
The Author-Publisher agreement will require you to guarantee that all third party copyrighted works in your manuscript have been used with proper permission from the copyright owner.
Whether you can re-use the copyrighted work depends on the license applied to the scholarly work.
Publications can be divided up into two broad categories:
Creative Commons Licensed Work | Non-Creative Commons Licensed Work |
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You might be able to re-use the work without seeking permission if the author has distributed the scholarly work under certain Creative Commons licenses. Please check that you are able to comply with the terms of the Creative Commons license. |
Necessary to seek permission from the publisher/journal. Publishers may have copyright clearance systems and policies that allow users to request for permissions, such as:
If no copyright clearance system exists, contact the copyright owner directly following these steps. |
For more tips on searching for re-usable content, please refer to the search tips here.