Open Access & Copyright

When you submit an article or other publication to a publisher, you will often have to give up your rights to publish your text elsewhere by signing a Copyright Transfer Agreement.

Aalborg University’s Open Access policy recommends that you at minimum keep the right to parallel publishing in the university’s repository Pure. You can ensure this by getting an addition to the publishing agreement. The Ministry of Higher Education and Science has drawn up a contract letter and an addendum to the publishing agreement that you can attach when you send your documents to the publisher/journal. One of the primary goals of Open Science is to bridge the gap between society and university, and you can contribute to this by keeping your rights to parallel publishing in Pure.

If you have not retained the right to parallel publishing, we recommend that the article is recorded in Pure as full text after the stated embargo period, and in the correct version. Most publishers/journals allow that the accepted version is uploaded in e.g. university repositories after the stated embargo period. It is your responsibility to upload the correct version in Pure, and to see to that you comply with the copyright policy of the publisher/journal.

Creative commons

You will often run into the term Creative Commons license when you are dealing with Open Access publishing. With a Creative Commons license (CC-license), you can tailor your copyrights according to your needs, thereby providing users of your work with a number of exceptions from Copyright Law. Creative Commons covers the area between full copyright (all rights reserved) and public domain (a total waiver of rights to the work). Read more about Creative Commons and the different licenses.