Copyright clearance
Publishers generally require authors to sign some sort of copyright transfer agreement or license to publish agreement prior to the publication of material. These agreements vary between publishers. Before starting the deposit process, please investigate if the publisher allows deposit of a copy into an institutional repository, this is also called self-archiving. Copyright clearance can be done in various ways depending on the content type. If you have published a book that you also wish to deposit in digital form into DSpace@Knowledge Gateway Unless you at the time of publishing have retained rights to deposit a digital copy into DSpace@Knowledge Gateway you will have to contact the publisher in order to seek permission for this deposit. If you are in the process of publishing your article with a journal publisher it is also possible to retain rights allowing you to place your paper in DSpace@Cambridge. Some academic authors believe it was necessary to transfer copyright to the publisher when publishing a scientific article. This however, is not the case. Copyright is something that lies with the author. The author can choose to transfer the copyright to the publisher, but this often restricts him/her in future use of the work, for example for teaching purposes. Alternatively, the author can authorize the publisher to publish his/her work by using a licence. With this licence a publisher can publish as usual and if necessary still take measures against illegal copy making. For the author a licence means that he/she retains the right to publish his work somewhere else, for example freely accessible on the internet, or on a department’s website, or an improved version in a different medium.
Some publishers already allow self-archiving in repositories; for example, Elsevier and Blackwell. Read the publisher’s agreement you are asked to sign carefully. In case it does not refer to depositing in repositories discuss with the publisher a possible amendment of the existing agreement or using an alternative one.
