Intellectual Property Rights to scholarly publications

Intellectual property rights (IPR)

Conditions for protection by intellectual property rights (IPR):

• It must be a scholarly, literary or artistic work, e.g. a book, a thesis or an article. Public documents are not protected by IPR
• The work must be original and/or creative (intellectual property), and be the result of the owner’s creative efforts. You may not copy someone else’s work and claim it as your own
• The work must be expressed e.g. as a text, an illustration or a figure. The IPR rights protect the expression itself but not the idea

The originator has the right to his/her work from the moment of creation. Protection does not depend on registering or labelling the work.​

There are two types of rights:

• Moral rights

  The right to be named and the right to have one’s work referred to or reproduced in a way that does not insult the originator

• Economic rights

  ​The right to make copies and make one’s work accessible. This encompasses rights to:

  • Reproduce the work, e.g. through photocopying and digital archiving
  • Distribute the work, e.g. through sales, lending or renting
  • Public display and presentation of the work, e.g. a lecture, a musical performance or making an article or a book accessible online
  • Transformation of the work, e.g. translation of a book

Generally, authors possess both economic and moral rights to their own work but they may renounce their economic rights through e.g. publishing or employment contracts.​

Co-authorship

The IPR rights’ basis for co-authorship is about contribution to making the work. This implies that all co-authors must have contributed to writing a text.

• There are different forms of co-authorship
  • Common work: Rights are jointly owned, e.g. an article
  • Collective work: The editor owns the collective work and individual authors own separate parts of the work, e.g. an anthology
  • Derivative work: The author owns the rights to the original work, while the author of the adapted or edited work owns the right to the new version, e.g. a translated book
• Vancouver rules of co-authorship

  In scholarly publishing the ethical rules of co-authorship are often different from the ones established by IPR. Generally, research communities relate to the Vancouver rules of co-authorship. These rules entail that co-authors must have contributed significantly to:

  • Planning, designing, collection of data or analyzing and interpreting data
  • Writing the manuscript or critically revising its contents
  • Approving the final manuscript version

  All of these three conditions must be met.​

Reuse of material

Prior to reusing the material of others, researchers have to ask permission. This applies to e.g. reuse of photos, illustrations, graphs, and parts of or entire presentations. If researchers have renounced their rights to publishers, those interested in reusing material must contact the publisher and ask for permission.​

• Exceptions

  Copyright has a range of limitations, of which the most important concerning reuse for research purposes are the following:​

  • Private use: Users may copy materials for private use, including their own use as well as that of their family, friends, and in other groups where members have a personal relation to one another.
  • Citation rights: Excerpts from material may be used according to common citation rights. Everyone is allowed to cite publicized works in accordance with good practice and to the extent the purpose requires.
  • Public domain: Material that is considered public domain is no longer protected by copyright and may be used without permission. In most countries, public domain status occurs 70 years after the year of death of the last author/creator. Other conditions apply to materials that are not intellectual property (e.g. photos). The rights of naming and respect (moral rights) apply even though works are considered as public domain.
  • Open licences: Materials that have been published with an open licence (e.g. Creative Commons) may be reused according to the​ requirements set by the licence in question, e.g. non-commercial use or share alike. Read more about licences.
  • Contractual licence: In Norway and other countries there are organizations managing collective licences on behalf of rights holders. Collective agreements between universities and the organization Kopinor grant students and employees extended rights to use published written works for teaching and research purposes.

See more information on rights in scholarly publishing and open licences​.