How to protect your work
How to protect your work
As the author of a work, without having to register it anywhere, the law recognizes two types of rights: moral rights and exploitation rights. When you publish, you must be very aware of what exploitation rights you are granting: reproduction, distribution, online communication, translations, adaptations, etc.
You can consult the publishing policies of each publication on websites such as Sherpa/Romeo (Platform for international journals), or Dulcinea (Platform for Spanish scientific publications).
When posting a copy of articles to a repository, publishers may apply the same conditions or establish different ones.
When publishing a work, you must consider the intellectual property rights of third-party content that you may have included.
You can also protect your work using Creative Commons.
- Publish your unpublished research texts, or your research texts that have not been published in commercial publications, for free on: blogs, websites, virtual campuses or institutional repositories.
- Use excerpts from other texts for critique or review, always citing authorship.
- Share the article with friends, colleagues or researchers directly.
- Choose the type of license, exploitation or dissemination you want for your document. Always bear in mind the contract you have with the publisher.
- Publish on your website or blog your research and/or academic work previously published in journals or commercial publications that hold the exclusive exploitation rights.
- Publish works by multiple authors without the agreement of all authors.
- Sign a contract that assigns the exploitation rights exclusively with the publisher if the conditions of the project, scholarship or call do not allow it.
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that has prepared a series of predefined licenses, compatible with international copyright law, with the aim of enabling authors to share their work more easily and with full legal certainty. These are explicit notices of assignment of rights.
Works published with these licenses, therefore, can be used without requesting any authorization, as long as the terms of use that the author has stipulated in the license are respected.
All Creative Commons licenses include general terms and conditions and a combination of specific conditions. The general conditions are as follows: the reproduction, distribution and public communication of the work is authorized, in all known modalities (media and formats), throughout the term of copyright protection (for life), free of charge worldwide.
The specific conditions that can be combined are as follows. The first is included as mandatory in all licenses, while the others are optional and the author of the work may decide to apply them or not.
- Attribution, BY
The authorship of the work must always be attributed, stating at least the name of the author, the title of the work and, if any, the URL link to the work.- NoCommercial, NC
The author does not authorize the use of the work for commercial purposes. “Commercial use” is understood as that which is aimed at obtaining a commercial profit or a monetary consideration.- NoDerivatives, ND
The author does not authorize the amendment of the work. A "derivative work" would be a work created from the original work subject to the license. e.g. a translation, a reworking, etc.- ShareAlike, SA
Derivative works are authorized, provided that, when disclosed, the same license as the original work is maintained.
The combination of these specific conditions gives rise to the main Creative Commons licenses
