"Learning how to see"

Help with copyright for creators, media professionals, entrepreneurs, and students

2015-04-16T09:49:00.000+01:00

A spring clean at home surfaced an article on 'copyright user' from some time ago, which I ripped out of a magazine. I have been meaning to share it, so here it is with a couple of related websites. There are also a range of books available on the topic in the library.

http://copyrightuser.org/

“CopyrightUser.org is an online resource aimed at making UK copyright law accessible to creators, media professionals, entrepreneurs, students, and members of the public.”

http://www.copyrighthub.co.uk/

"...help if you want to get permission to use somebody else's work, or want to know about how copyright relates to your own work."

"...sets out to answer questions that university students may have about copyright. It is intended as a document staff can provide to students to inform them about the basics of copyright enabling them to protect their own work and to use other people’s materials lawfully."

NB: JISC legal has now closed, so this guide won't be updated.

Other resources

Morrison, C. (2015). Copyright the Card Game. Available from Jorum: http://find.jorum.ac.uk/resources/19369

Open Access Policy for the university

2014-04-24T17:00:00.000+01:00

If you are publishing in journals this will be of interest...

The university has a new Open Access Policy. In essence this states that, "The university supports the principle of making publically funded and peer‐reviewed research available via open access." This reflects HEFCE's policy of making open access a requirement for submission to the next Research Excellence Framework - for journal articles. You can read more about HEFCE's stance here, along with details about the work they are doing in relation to monographs.

Open Access can either be through the 'gold' or 'green' routes:

Gold - is where the research is made available through publishing with an open access journal OR through paying a subscription-based journal to publish the article available on an open-access basis. (Limited funds are available to pay the Article Processing Charge (APC) if that applies to the journal you are submitting to. See the link below for the application form.)

Green - is where the research is made available via a repository (e.g. WestminsterResearch), where this is allowed by the journal that has accepted your work. In this model the publisher sometimes imposes an embargo (i.e. you have to wait for a period before you have the right to include your research on WestminsterResearch), but some journals do allow immediate inclusion on an institutional respository.

More information is available about how this will work at Westminster on the WestminsterResearch pages (use the links in the grey sub-menu to navigate). You should look particularly at the 'Information for our authors and open access policy' section, which gives links to two useful resources - SHERPA/JULIET and SHERPA/ROMEO.

These resources have been around for an age and give you a quick reference to what the policies of funders are in relation to open access (SHERPA/JULIET) and what the policies of individual journals are (SHERPA/ROMEO). SHERPA/ROMEO will show what a journals policies are in relation to:

paid open access
the deposit to an institutional repository of: author's pre-prints (i.e. pre-refereed and not compliant with the HEFCE policy), author's post-prints (as published minus publisher formatting), and the publisher version/PDF.

This new policy will give impetus to the use of WestminsterResearch as not just a record of published work, but as a repository of it; and in many cases you will already have the right to deposit the full-text of articles you have authored onto WestminsterResearch.

If you would like to discuss any of this with me, please get in touch. I have been briefed, and I am also attending an update session next week where I could raise any issues that you wish to raise.

Further Reading

See my post on Open Access Search Tools

Open access - search tools

2014-04-24T16:30:00.000+01:00

With the change in policy from HEFCE in relation to the REF, it looks like there is some impetus for these long-standing initiatives below to come into their own. Most useful in this list, which I collated a couple of years ago, are CORE, DOAB, DOAJ, EThOS, OAIster, and PQDT Open.

CORE - an aggregated search of UK repositories (it's like Google Scholar for UK research repositories). Further information.

DART-Europe - research theses from a consortium of European research libraries

DOAB - Directory of Open Access Books

DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals

EThOS [Electronic Theses Online Service from the British Library. Selected items available for download after registration]

OAPEN [Open Access Publishing in European Networks] is a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

OAIster - a union catalogue of open access resources, provided by OCLC/Worldcat. Further information

OpenDOAR Search - search contents of open access repositories listed on OpenDOAR [Directory of Open Access Repositories]

OpenDepot Search - search of e-prints from researchers at institutions that do not have an institutional repository

PQDT Open [Proquest Dissertations and Theses Open] - provides the full text of open access dissertations and theses available on the Proquest platform

ROAR Search - search contents of repositories listed on ROAR [Registry of Open Access Repositories]

SHERPA Search - search UK repositories listed on OpenDOAR [Directory of Open Access Repositories]