Licensing & Copyrights Terms

The first copyright to a paper is owned by the authors (or their employer, in some instances). When that paper is published, the author's copyright may be retained, licenced, or transferred to the publisher.

According to Openventio, journals should allow authors to retain complete ownership of their papers. The authors will then grant the publisher first publication rights and other non-exclusive publishing rights.

Even if the author retains the rights to the work, the publisher may impose restrictions:

The publisher requires exclusive publishing rights. This means the author no longer has complete copyright.

A commercial rights transfer or exclusive licence is required by the publisher. This means the author no longer has complete copyright.

The copyright conditions must not conflict with the licencing conditions or the open access policy.

For open-access content, the phrase "all rights reserved" should never be used.

Authorship Rights

The terms of the Creative Commons (or other) licence do not apply to the copyright holder. This means that if the author retains full copyright, the licence extends to the readers as well as the publisher.

The licence, however, applies to both readers and authors when:

The author retains copyright and grants the publisher exclusive publishing rights. The author retains the copyright and transfers or grants the publisher exclusive commercial rights, and a non-commercial licence is used.