Copyright for researchers

Copyright ownership

The Flinders University Intellectual Property Policy outlines ownership of copyright in work created by staff members, academic status holders, and students. The university asserts ownership of work and research outputs produced by staff. The library provides assistance with managing copyright and permissions in relation to publications, datasets, use of pre-existing published material, and sharing research outputs. For commercialisation (i.e. trademarks and patents), consult Strategic Partnerships and Research Commercialisation.

Higher Degree by Research Students

Students retain copyright in their work, including in their research outputs and theses. Students are bound by the HDR Thesis Rules to make their thesis publicly available and will need to ensure they have copyright clearance to include figures and publications, more information is available on the Thesis Submission page.
The Student Research IP Procedures outline circumstances in which a HDR student may be required to assign their intellectual property to the university when participating in a research activity.

Permissions for using third party material

Permission is required to include third party material in work that will be publicly disseminated or published. For example, reusing a figure from a journal article in your own article will require permission from the original publisher (not the authors). Most publishers will not accept a manuscript until copyright permission has been obtained for photos and figures that have been included from other sources. Permission is required regardless of whether the original material was officially published or from a freely available source; with an exception only applying where the item has had copyright expire or carries an open licence (explicit up front permission).

For reusing content from online journals, permission can often be sought by filling out an online form through a service called RightsLink. Look for a ‘Rights and Permissions’ or ‘Get permissions’ link on the article webpage to initiate this process.

For other material (e.g. from books or websites), permission will likely need to be sought via email. When asking for permission it is advisable to include the following details in writing:

• specific details of the material that you plan to use (e.g. citation and exact page number / figure title)
• how you are using the material, including the title of your new work and where you expect it to be published
• if known, the expected distribution and format (e.g. number of books being printed)

HDR students should refer to the Thesis Submission page and use the email template provided.

Sharing your research outputs

Datasets belonging to Flinders University can be made open access and shared via ROADS (Figshare), which allows you to select an appropriate open licence to make the data usable by others.

For research publications, the publisher will stipulate the conditions on how papers can be shared. Publisher PDFs generally cannot be shared, including via networking sites like ResearchGate and Academia.edu (unless the paper was published open access and has a Creative Commons licence). To responsibly share papers with others, staff can attach a copy of the final peer-reviewed accepted manuscript into ResearchNow. Library staff will confirm if the publisher permits the paper to be shared and will do so according to publisher conditions.