Publish Books Open Access: Copyright and Licencing

You are the first owner of copyright in your scholarly work unless it has been commissioned by the University or a funding contract claims ownership. 

Traditionally, when writing for publication the publisher usually requires the author to sign a copyright transfer agreement (CTA). Once this agreement has been signed, the copyright in the whole work (including previous versions) belongs to the publisher. Publishers' policies often permit the author to retain a limited number of rights to do certain things with the work, such as self-archive the final peer-reviewed version in an institutional repository like CentAUR. However, you should always check the publisher's policy to see what is allowed.

Instead of signing a CTA, authors are advised to retain their copyright and to licence their work with a Creative Commons licence so that they can re-use their work in any way that they choose. They can issue the publisher with a non-exclusive licence to publish the work as Open Access.

Open Access research outputs should carry a Creative Commons licence. Creative Commons is a licensing scheme which allows authors to license their work so that others may re-use it without having to contact them for permission. You may not add a Creative Commons licence to a work for which you do not hold the copyright. Note that if you have assigned copyright to the publisher you will not be able to add a licence to your work, including any earlier versions of it, unless you ask for permission from the publisher. If you retain the copyright, you can do whatever you like with your work, including adding a licence to it.

The CC BY licence, is the most open of the Creative Commons licences and it enables re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The CC BY licence allows for commercial use.

More restrictive versions of the licence limit reuse, so that your publication cannot be be used for commercial purposes (CC BY NC) or derivatives created from it (CC BY ND) or a combination of both (CC BY NC ND)

If you are funded by the UKRI or other external funders, you must choose the version of the licence recommended by them so that you are compliant with your funder's policy.  UKRI prefers CC BY but will permit any Creative Commons Licence or an Open Government Licence for publishing books Open Access.

There may occasionally be cases in which you intend to publish Open Access but cannot use a Creative Commons licence.

If your work is subject to Crown Copyright, you may need to use an Open Government Licence (OGL) instead. This is compatible with the CC BY licence.

Publishing a work under Open Access is no different from publishing under the traditional route when it comes to the requirement to obtain copyright permission to use third party content in your journal article or book. However, some types of work (such as images of fine art) carry high reproduction fees, particularly if the material is to be made freely available online.

When publishing under Open Access, you will need to negotiate for worldwide digital rights to use third party material, as it will be made available online and accessible to everyone. If you cannot get permission to reproduce material in this way, or you cannot afford the fees, you may be able to self-archive your work in CentAUR without the third party content.

UKRI includes the following in its policy exemptions for Open Access books and chapters: where reuse permissions for third-party materials cannot be obtained and there is no suitable alternative option available to enable Open Access publication. If you think that you need to apply an exemption please contact oarequests@reading.ac.uk for advice.

If your work contains third party copyright material, you must ensure that you have the copyright holder's permission to make their work available under a Creative Commons licence unless an exception to copyright (such as quotations for the purpose of criticism or review) applies. For more information, see the following guides.