"I can just copy this, right?": Introducing students to copyright

“I can just copy this, right?”Introducing Students to Copyright

Charles F. Huber246th ACS National Meeting

Indianapolis, INSeptember 11, 2013

© 2013 Charles F. Huber

This work by Charles F. Huber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

http://guides.library.ucsb.edu/chem184

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Students and Copyright

“I can just copy this, right?” “ Introducing Students to Copyright Charles F. Huber 246th ACS National Meeting Indianapolis, IN

• Students need to be aware of the implications of copyright law for them in two respects:– As users of copyrighted materials– As creators of copyrighted materials

• Undergraduates are primarily involved as users.

• Graduate students are involved as users and creators.

Undergraduates and Copyright

• Undergraduates don’t need (or want!) to learn all the subtleties of copyright law. A few basics will suffice.

• Copyright is a legal protection granted to authors and creators of any creative work– So books, articles, graphs, charts, photos, audio, video

are all protected.• Copyright is for a limited time.– It’s complicated, but you can say anything published in

the USA before 1923 is no longer copyrighted.“I can just copy this, right?” “ Introducing Students to Copyright Charles F. Huber 246th ACS National Meeting Indianapolis, IN

Undergraduates and Copyright

• Copyright applies to the EXPRESSION of an idea.– So raw facts/data cannot be copyrighted, but…– Arrangements of them (tables, charts, graphs) or

discussion of them can be.• Users need to have permission to copy,

distribute or adapt copyrighted material.– BUT…there are exceptions!


Fair Use

• The main exception students should be aware of is FAIR USE.– Use for academic purposes (coursework, in-class

presentations) is generally OK. Copying for mass distribution or sale is NOT OK.

– How much of a work you use is also a factor:• Copy a paragraph of a book – OK• Copy an entire textbook – NOT OK


Copyright and Plagiarism

• Copyright law does not require you to attribute the sources you use. However, the rules of academic scholarship do require it!

• Even something that is out-of-copyright (public domain) must still be attributed properly or using it is plagiarism.

• Copyright is a legal issue; plagiarism is an ethical issue.

• BUT…college/university policies can make plagiarism subject to harsh penalties.


When and Where to Reach Undergraduates

• Introductory lab courses– Students don’t write many papers in chemistry

lecture courses, but they do copy material for lab reports.

• Library research classes/lectures• Writing classes– Perhaps the best venue, if you have a good

relationship with the writing instructors.


Graduate Students and Copyright

• Graduate students, as prospective authors for publication, need to know a lot more about copyright and related issues.– They are more likely to bump against the limits of

fair use exceptions in using copyrighted material.– Understanding and defending their rights as

authors themselves is becoming increasingly complicated.


Downloading Copyrighted Material

• Graduate students are more likely to want to download significant quantities of copyrighted material, either for their personal biblipgraphic databases, or for data mining.

• If this is for academic purposes, it should be covered by fair use…BUT– Downloading entire issues of a journal may run afoul of the

quantity restrictions of fair use.– Separate from copyright, journal tems of use may restrict

or prohibit mass downloaded, automated downloading or data mining


Reusing Copyrighted Materials

• Use of copyrighted charts, graphs, diagrams, etc. falls under academic fair use if it’s for internal use: lab reports, seminars, etc.

• But if they are to be used in journal articles, dissertations or conference papers that will be redistributed, permission must be obtained. If there’s any doubt – seek permission!

• Graduate students need to know how to locate permissions policies, and determine whether permission comes from the author(s) or publisher.

• The Copyright Clearance Center acts as a central clearinghouse for all sorts of permissions issues. (http://www.copyright.com/)


Author’s Rights

• Under U.S. law, anything which is committed to tangible form is copyrighted. The author owns the copyright from that moment, and can control who may copy, publish, adapt, etc. that work. BUT…

• As in all things, there are circumstances that may modify that, and graduate students should become aware of these circumstances.


Co-Authorship

• The copyright of any work with multiple authors is co-owned by all of them, unless there is a prior agreement among them to the contrary.

• Any of them can grant permissions; all must agree to any exclusive licence.

• In practice, however, faculty advisors tend to exercise control of jointly authored papers.


Work for Hire

• Works that are created as part of an employee’s duties frequently belong to the amployer.

• In an academic setting, this depends on institutional policy. At the Univ. of California:– Research papers normally belong to the researchers.– Teaching materials normally belong to the instructor.– Other creations belong to the Regents of the U of C.

• Graduate students should seek out and become familiar with the policies of their institution.


Publishers and Copyright

• Traditionally, scholarly journal publishers have required that, on acceptance, authors assign the copyright for their article to the publisher.

• In recent years, the obligations and options of authors have become much more complex, offering opportunities, but requiring more expertise on the author’s part.


Open Access: many things to many people

• Commonly, “open access” publishing is taken to refer to publishing without a subscription required for access, growing from the principles that the widest distribution of knowledge is a good thing, and that publicly-supported research should be freely available to the public.

• However, some definitions also include the non-exclusive freedom to re-use and adapt the publication.


Mandated Open Access

• Funding mandates – An increasing number of funding agencies, both public (NIH) and private (Wellcome Trust) require some kind of open access to publications based on funded research.

• Institutional Mandates – More and more universities (Harvard, MIT, Stanford, UC) also require deposition of articles in an institutional repository with open access.

• The general concept of these mandates, as well as the details of those they must deal with, are important conceps for graduate students.


Publisher Copyright Transfer

• As with any other legal agreement, grad student authors should get used to reading and understanding the agreements they sign when publishing an article.

• Major publishers will generally have their agreements online under “instructions for Authors” or the like

• A quick way to find summaries of publisher copyright policies is the Sherpa/RoMEO website: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo


SHERPA/RoMeo website


SHERPA/RoMEO entry for JOC


Amending Publlsher Agreements

• While publishers don’t generally advertise the fact, some will allow authors to amend their copyright transfer agreements.

• There are standard addenda available that authors can use:– SPARC Author Addendum

http://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/authors/addendum– Science Commons Author Addendum

http://scholars.sciencecommons.org/– Some universites have their own recommended addenda.


Creative Commons

• “Creative Commons” (http://creativecommons.org/) is a non-profit organization that has developed a set of standard legal licences which authors can apply to their works.

• While retaining basic copyright, you can grant selected, non-exclusive rights to users.

• Some open-access journals are now using “CC” licences; the Directory of Open Access Journals encourages it, and is considering requiring such policies for journals to be listed in the directory.


http://creativecommons.org/

Dissertations

• Authors must, as with any other publication, get permission to reuse the copyrighted materials of others (charts, graphs, figures, etc.)

• Moreover, if the dissertation is a simple assembly of published journal articles, the student needs to check their permissions from the publisher, to, in effect, reprint the articles.


Dissertations (cont.)

• Not strictly a copyright issue, but related:– Many institutions require dissertations to be

deposited in an institutional repository and/or submitted to ProQuest for non-exclusive distribution.

– If there is material in the dissertation which is to be submitted for journal publication, some journals will require that electronic distribution of the dissertation be embargoed until after the journal article appears.


When and Where to Reach Graduate Students

• Graduate Student Orientations – not enough time to cover the issues in depth, but can at least alert them that you are available to help.

• Library Research Classes – not all grads will take them.

• Work with Graduate Division (or equivalent) to get the word out.

• Presentations to research groups – presence of the advisor lends credibility…and you may be able to teach the faculty a thing or two!


"I can just copy this, right?": Introducing students to copyright

Education

Transcript of "I can just copy this, right?": Introducing students to copyright