Copyright is a type of intellectual property which protects certain sorts of original creative work, including academic articles. Copyright allows the creator of a work to decide whether, and under what conditions, their work may be used, published and distributed by others. As such, it governs how others can use, publish and distribute articles.
Understanding your copyright options as an author is becoming ever more important, especially with the growth of open access publishing.
As a user, you have the right to request To publish an article and make it available, we need publishing rights from you for that work. We therefore ask authors for publishing in TTSERS to sign an author contract which grants us the necessary publishing rights. This will be after your manuscript has been through the peer-review process, been accepted and moves into publishing. Our Publication team will then send you an email with all the details.
To protect the rights and interests of both parties, TTSERS requires an exclusive licence that clearly stipulates our rights and the specific rights retained by authors. We ask the corresponding author to grant this exclusive licence to TTSERS on behalf of all authors. TTSERS agrees to publish the manuscript and has the right:
to publish, reproduce, distribute, display and store the manuscript;
to translate the manuscript into other languages;
to create adaptations, reprints, and create summaries, extracts and/or, abstracts of the manuscript;
to create any other derivative work(s) based on the manuscript;
to include electronic links from the manuscript to third party material;
to license any third party to do any or all of the above;
to authorize TTSERS to take legal proceedings in the copyright owner's name and on the author(s)' behalf if the author(s)' believe that a third party is infringing or is likely to infringe copyright in the manuscript.
In our standard author contract, you transfer – or “assign” – copyright to us as the owner and publisher of the journal .
Assigning the copyright enables us to:
Authors are allowed to use their own articles for non-commercial purposes without seeking permission from TTSERS. For commercial use we need to know about it. Authors retain the following right to:
Alternatively, in some circumstances, you may grant us an exclusive license to publish your paper rather than assigning copyright. In this arrangement, you as the author retain copyright in your work, but grant us exclusive rights to publish and disseminate it.
As with an assignment, reuse requests are handled by the publisher on your behalf. The publisher will manage the intellectual property rights and represent your article in cases of copyright infringement.
When you publish an open access article, you will retain the copyright in your work. We will ask you to sign an author contract which gives us the non-exclusive right to publish the Version of Record of your article. This author contract incorporates the Creative Commons license of your choice, which will dictate what others can do with your article once it has been published.
