Who owns the copyright for scholarly materials at Xavier University? In general, authors (faculty, students, staff,) at XU own the rights to their works of scholarship unless they have given those rights in writing to another party or have produced the work under a grant that required some other distribution of rights. Some examples of works of scholarship include:
scholarly publications
journal articles
books
plays
poems
works of music
works of art
Works of scholarship do not include software.
What rights do I give to Xavier University when I submit my materials to XU DSpace? In order to place your work(s) in XU DSpace and make them openly available on the web, you must agree to the XU DSpace limited, non-exclusive license, which:
confirms that you own the copyright to the items,
grants Xavier University permission to distribute make the items accessible worldwide, and
grants Xavier University permission to take the necessary steps to preserve them.
Under this agreement between you and Xavier University, you retain all rights you had to these items before they were deposited, such as making copies available on other web sites or publishing them in the same form or in a revised form. There is no need to obtain additional permission from Xavier University. NOTE: The permission you grant to Xavier University by accepting this license is non-revocable; once granted, copyright holders cannot rescind their permission for Xavier University to make accessible and preserve these works. If you submit your own work to XU DSpace, you will be required to agree to the XU DSpace License as part of the submission process. If the library will be submitting material on your behalf, you must grant permission using the XU DSpace License and Permission Form for Mediated Submissions .
What about works with multiple authors? Co-authors who wish to submit materials to XU DSpace must have permission from other copyright holders to do so.
What rights do readers of XU DSpace have? By default, materials deposited into XU DSpace are open access, which means anyone on the web can access them. Also by default, all XU DSpace materials are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved by the copyright holder. As an alternative to reserving all rights, authors are encouraged to consider licensing their works under a Creative Commons License, under which they can preserve those rights that are most important to them (e.g., proper attribution,) and at the same time explicitly grant to readers certain other rights chosen by the author to be used at the readers discretion (e.g., copy, distribute, display, or perform the work.) Documents in XU DSpace that are licensed under Creative Commons licenses will display the license conditions.
Copyright guidelines for frequently-deposited materials in XU DSpace
Published works (postprints): Authors often want to provide open access to the full text of their articles that have been reviewed, revised and accepted for publication in scholarly journals or other published formats. Many publishers do grant their authors such rights, but policies vary widely. Authors should check with their publishers to see if the author copyright agreement allows the author to post the article in a local open-access repository. The RoMEO Project (Rights MEtadata for Open archiving; http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php) has compiled a list of many journals' copyright policies about self-archiving. If the publisher has not granted that right to the author in the standard author agreement, authors are encouraged to contact their publisher and request permission to do so. For future agreements, authors are encouraged to understand their rights as authors and to consider retaining some of them. An easy-to-use author addendum at the SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Create Change site helps authors negotiate with publishers for those rights.
Preprints (draft papers that have not been submitted for publication): In some disciplines, authors routinely submit draft papers to preprint repositories or working paper series for review and feedback prior to submitting them for formal publication. Most of these preprint repositories are open-access, and authors retain the rights to deposit those works into XU DSpace. Authors who wish to deposit a pre-print into XU DSpace are advised to check pre-publication requirements of journals to which they may subsequently submit the work for formal publication. Some publishers may view such pre-print posting in open-access repositories as prior publication and will not publish the articles; others may require that preprints be removed upon publication in their journal.
Conference papers, presentations, etc.: In general, these are traditional works of scholarship, and unless transferred in writing to another entity, all rights remain with the author.
Works published/distributed by Xavier University and XU academic departments, research centers, etc.: Working paper series, research reports, conference proceedings, and other scholarly materials distributed by Xavier University or XU academic departments via their web site or printed publications may be posted into XU DSpace with appropriate author permissions. It is best for departments to obtain the authors explicit permission to distribute the work in XU DSpace, but that requirement might be waived for materials that have been published prior to XU DSpace under shared understandings that the departments would distribute or publish them. Please contact us to discuss.
Dissertations & theses: XU students retain all rights to their dissertations. When they submit their dissertations to XU, they will be asked to give Xavier University permission to distribute their dissertation via XU DSpace. Contact us.
Undergraduate and graduate student papers and projects: In general, students retain all rights to the materials they produce at Xavier University, unless the material came from a grant-funded project or the student has - in writing - transmitted his/her copyright to another entity. Departments/units who would like to post student scholarship in XU DSpace must first obtain the students permission to distribute the material via XU DSpace, and should provide full disclosure to students about possible future publication restrictions if the paper has been posted in an open-access repository.
