Copyright, licensing, and third-party material are important considerations when publishing an open access book. These will affect who has the rights to the work and what others can do with it.
You should always check if your research funder or institution specifies which copyright and licence types you select for your output. During the process of producing your open access book, you will also have to consider the third-party copyright for material such as images, quotations and content you include in the book.
Copyright and open access books
Generally, authors will retain the copyright when publishing open access books and may license specific rights, including publication rights, to the publisher. Alternatively, the author can assign copyright to the publisher provided that the work is made freely available for further distribution under the terms of an open licence (Author Alliance, 2015).
When you publish an open access book or book chapter, your publisher may ask you to assign certain rights to them. The rights you agree to transfer when publishing books will vary between publishers so it is important to read the contract you sign with your publisher carefully.
Typically there are three ways you can assign certain rights, you may wish to negotiate these with a publisher before signing a contract:
- An assignment of copyright (a transfer of ownership of your copyright to your publisher, meaning the author of the work no longer owns the parts of the copyright that were assigned and cannot exercise those rights or license them to someone else);
- An exclusive licence (giving your publisher permission to do certain things with your copyright on an exclusive basis, but the ownership of the copyright is not transferred. As the work will be made freely available, the publisher cannot claim exclusive publication rights. However, the publisher may ask for first publication rights);
- A non-exclusive licence (giving your publisher permission to do certain things with your copyright on a non-exclusive basis, meaning these permissions could be granted to an unlimited number of non-exclusive licencees).
Adapted from Understanding and negotiating book publication contract, Chapter 5: The Grant of Rights Clause, available under Creative Commons License (CC BY 4.0) and Barnes, L. (2018), used under a Creative Commons License (CC BY 4.0).
Copyright and open access books: useful resources
Copyright and OA books: useful resources
- Publishing under the UKRI open access policy: copyright and creative commons licences
- Open Policy Finder
- Open Book Publishers: Copyright and licensing – what do I need to know?
- Contracting and Copyright
- Understanding and Negotiating Book Publication Contracts
Publishing under the UKRI open access policy: copyright and creative commons licences
A useful guide produced by JISC that is also relevant to non-UKRI funded researchers.
Open Policy Finder by Jisc is a tool which provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies.
Open Book Publishers: Copyright and licensing – what do I need to know? A useful blog post discussing copyright and open access books.
Contracting and Copyright - OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit
Understanding and Negotiating Book Publication Contracts - Provides a useful overview of copyright and how to negotiate with publishers which rights you hand over.
Fill in the following form to request a meeting with the Library’s Copyright and Scholarly Communications Librarian. The session can be conducted in Teams or by phone. Alternatively, you can send your copyright query directly to copyright@ic.ac.uk.