From the moment a work is created, the law recognizes rights to the author of it. These copyrights are divided into moral rights and exploitation or patrimonial rights. The moral rights of authorship and integrity of the work are inalienable and inalienable. The rights of exploitation of his work in any form and, especially, the rights of reproduction, distribution, public communication and transformation cannot be carried out without the permission of the author.

Moral rights grant the author the right to be recognized as such and are non-transferable. However, the exploitation rights can be assigned to third parties as is the case with published works.

Spanish legislation on intellectual property is the Law 23/2006, of July 7, which modifies the revised text of the Intellectual Property Law, approved by Royal Legislative Decree 1/1996, of April 12.

When an author deposits their documents in RODIN, they retain all their intellectual property rights, and therefore they are free to use the deposited contents for the purposes they deem appropriate (deposit them in other repositories, post the documents on personal websites, publish them in journals… ). Depositing documents in RODIN is not an alternative to the traditional publication system but rather a complement for the dissemination of knowledge, and the conservation of the institution’s scientific production.

Copyright and self-archiving

When an author wants to deposit a work in RODIN, he must be in a position to guarantee that said contents are free from copyright restrictions. To do this, it is necessary to distinguish if the work is unpublished or has already been published

– Unpublished works: In this case the author retains the exploitation rights of his work and simply has to authorize the University of Cádiz to disseminate his document through the UCA Repository, by accepting a Non-Exclusive Distribution License, that is, a contract between the author and the University, which allows the UCA to distribute and preserve his work, but the author retains all rights to his work.

In some cases, publishers do not accept works already disseminated through repositories, for this reason it is advisable for the author to know the contracts and self-archiving policies of publishers, for their subsequent publication.

– Already published works: Before including a work already published in RODIN, the author must know the conditions of transfer of the exploitation rights of his work and the self-archiving policy of the publisher. Although most publishers allow archiving of pre-print (the draft of the text to be published before peer review) it is recommended to consult the publisher’s policy.

In case the author does not know under what conditions he has transferred his exploitation rights (reproduction, distribution or public communication) to a publisher, he can consult the acceptance sheet of the publication rules or the transfer of rights sheet, in the case of journals or conferences, or the publishing contract in the case of monographs.

If you do not have this information, you can consult the Sherpa/Romeo database, where the copyright policies of the main international scientific-technical commercial publishers have been analyzed; o Dulcinea for Spanish publishers

Creative Commons Licensing

At the time of self-archiving his work, the author can decide on the use that can be made of it through a Creative Commons License, which allows them to maintain their rights as an author while granting certain uses to third parties under certain conditions.

All Creative Commons licenses require the recognition of the author of the work, facilitating the use, and at the same time safeguarding the attribution of the work to the author and preventing possible commercial use without permission. Creative Commons licenses offer some rights to third parties under four conditions: Attribution, Non-commercial, No derivative works and Share alike, with which six license models are generated:

There are two Creative Commons licenses for the public domain, that is, so that the works can be redistributed and manipulated completely freely and without restrictions, either commercially or non-commercially: CC0, for which the author of this work has renounced to your copyright to it, becoming part of the public domain; and the Public Domain tag, which highlights that the work is already in the public domain.

The RODIN administration recommends the Acknowledgment – Non-commercial – No derivative work license modality, by which the author allows the work to be copied, reproduced, distributed and publicly communicated, as long as the original author is cited and acknowledged. However, it is not allowed to generate a derivative work from it or use it for commercial purposes.

Assigning a Creative Commons license to the works deposited in RODIN is optional.

UCA non-exclusive distribution license

It is the contract between the author and the University of Cádiz allowing the UCA to distribute and preserve his work (the author continues to retain his copyright). It specifies:

“The Author assigns to the UNIVERSITY during the period of validity of this agreement, free of charge and exclusively for research and teaching purposes, the rights of reproduction, public communication and transformation of the Digital Works ”.

“The ownership of the moral rights and exploitation of intellectual property over the Digital Works belongs and will continue to belong to the Author”

Assigning this license to the works deposited in RODIN is not optional. If it is not accepted, the deposit of the work is not completed.

As it is a non-exclusive license, the author is free to use the deposited contents for the purposes he deems appropriate.

Control your rights, facilitate open access

You can expand this information by consulting the following tutorial: Control your rights, facilitate open access, prepared by the Working Group of Line 2 Research Area II Strategic Plan (2007-2011) of REBIUN. This tutorial is aimed at researchers who publish in scientific journals and aims to raise awareness of the importance of correctly managing the copyright of their works. Controlling them will facilitate their open publication and dissemination through different media, thus increasing the visibility and impact of the research results.

This video consists of three parts:

Researcher Intellectual production

This video introduces researchers in a general way, to the knowledge of the types of copyright, the relationship between author-editor and editor-author, as well as the topics of open access and deposit in repositories

Keep your copyright

This video clearly shows what any researcher must take into account to be able to share, reuse and disseminate their publications, what types of agreements the publishers offer them and what they allow them in relation to the deposit of their publications in open access in institutional repositories.

Publish in scientific journals and self-archive in Repositories

This video shows researchers some of the strategies to enhance the impact and visibility of their publications through the benefits of open access and depositing in repositories.

For more information contact:    repositorio.digital@uca.es