Research

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In the ever-changing environment of Higher Education, individuals involved in research are the pioneers of knowledge, delving into uncharted territories of discovery and innovation. As such, you engage with a vast array of copyrighted materials, from scholarly articles and literary works to data sets and multimedia content. Understanding the intricacies of copyright law is essential for ensuring ethical and compliant use of these materials, safeguarding the intellectual property of creators while advancing knowledge.

Unveiling copyright essentials: A foundation for informed use

Copyright law serves as a cornerstone of intellectual property protection, granting creators exclusive rights over their works. These rights empower creators to control the reproduction, distribution, adaptation, and public performance of their works. By understanding the scope of copyright protection, you can make informed decisions about the use of copyrighted materials in your research endeavours. Have a look at copyright basics section of this website for more information on copyright law.

Copyright in research: Ethical and compliant practices

As researchers, you play a crucial role in ensuring ethical and compliant use of copyrighted materials in your research endeavours:

  • Copyright ownership in research outputs: Generally, the copyright in research outputs, such as journal articles, book chapters, and data sets, belongs to the author(s) of the work.
  • Copyright management in collaborative research projects: In collaborative research, copyright ownership may be shared among the collaborators, and agreements should be in place to clarify copyright ownership and usage rights.
  • Copyright considerations when sharing data and findings: When sharing research data or findings, be mindful of any copyright restrictions that may apply.
  • Ethical use of copyrighted materials in research: Always cite copyrighted materials appropriately and adhere to fair dealing guidelines when incorporating them into your research.
  • Open access and copyright: Explore and utilize open access publishing options to make your research outputs freely accessible to a wider audience. An introduction to open access by Jisc is a good guide to understanding why open access is important.

Support for research at the University can be found on the Research and Innovation website, information on research ethics and integrity holds information that researchers need with regards to the ethics process and application for ethics can be found at Loughborough University Ethics ONline (LEON).  

Copyright in scholarly publishing: Protecting your Intellectual Property

As researchers, you also need to be mindful of copyright considerations when publishing your research outputs:

  • Licensing and permissions: License your research outputs responsibly, considering both commercial and non-commercial opportunities. Be also aware that your funders will require more permissible licenses, such as Creative Commons.
  • Protecting your copyright online: Be mindful of copyright infringement when sharing your research outputs online and use copyright notices and takedown procedures to protect your rights. Make sure you do not share research articles to which you do not own the copyright, avoiding sites such as ResearchGate or Academia.Edu.
  • Rights retention: Do not sign your copyright away. Add a rights retention statement on the accepted manuscript of your paper to be able to share your accepted manuscript freely, without embargo.

Using third-party material in your publication: A respectful use of others’ rights

You may wish to use material that is still under copyright. If a substantial amount of copyright material is used, commercial publishers will require that permission has been sought and granted for the re-use of such material.

Substantial third-party items:

  • Long extracts of text;
  • Illustrations or images;
  • Figures or tables;
  • Maps and charts, even those you have redrawn yourself;
  • Your own material that has been previously published.

The UKRI guide for managing third-party copyright for research publications is very useful.

If you think you might be using a substantial amount of third-party material, there are a few exceptions within the law that might allow their use.

The exceptions can be used for all types of copyright material, such as books, music and film, etc. For example, in order to critique or review a work done by another creator, you can use examples of the work to demonstrate to an audience the point you are trying to make. The Quotation exception can be used in a similar way.

There is a lot of overlap between the two exceptions, and both require that you meet the same criteria:

  1. The purpose is really quotation, criticism and review;
  2. The material used is available to the public;
  3. The use of the material is fair;
  4. Where practical sufficient acknowledgement has been done;
  5. Your use of the quotation has not extended further than is required to make your point.

‘Fair dealing’ is a legal term used to establish whether the use of a copyright material is lawful or if it infringes copyright. There is no definition that establishes what is ‘fair’ or not and it will depend on a case-by-case basis.

Some considerations that need to be taken to establish if the use can be considered fair, are:

  • The purpose of the use is non-commercial research and/or private study;
  • The use of the materials is fair;
  • The use is made by researchers or students for their own use only;
  • Sufficient acknowledgement is given to the copyright work used.

Text and data mining is the use of automated analytical techniques to analyse text and data for patterns, trends and other such information. This technique usually requires the copying of the work to be analysed. The exception allows researchers to copy large amounts of copyright works that the researchers have lawful access to for the purpose of computational analysis. The exception applies in the following scenarios only:

  • The purpose is for non-commercial research only;
  • Sufficient acknowledgement has been done;
  • The copy has not been shared or changed in any way.

More information about these exceptions can be found on the Government website.

You may also consider re-using different type of material, like:

  • Public Domain material: material to which copyright has expired or has been relinquished.
  • Open licenses material: if the material you wish to use has been published under a Creative Commons license it can be used freely, however, do make sure to familiarize yourself with the requirements of each license.

If none of the above can be applied, you will need to consider asking for permission from the copyright holder.

In many cases the rights holders you will be approaching will be academic publishers; for whom the details will be easily locatable on the Internet. However, you may well wish to include materials for which you need to seek out a specific individual or entity who are not as easy to locate. While you may spend some time tracking them down yourself, or decide to treat materials as an orphan work (see below) there are agencies that exist to aid in their location, such as Writers, Artists and their Copyright Holders (WATCH), the Society of Authors website and the Design and Artists Copyright Society website.

Orphan works is the term used to describe works where the rights holder cannot be identified or contacted. This can happen if the publisher has gone out of business or repeated attempts to contact them have failed. It may also be that the rights holder has predeceased your request, and you have been unable to establish to whom the rights have passed. The UK Government has introduced an Orphan Work licensing scheme for reuse of all works for commercial or non-commercial use.

If you want to digitise and make these works available, you need to factor time for rights clearance into your research project. How much time and effort you need will depend on the material you're working with. For example, if you're working with archival material that has multiple copyright owners who would likely object to the material being made available, you will need to put significant resource into it.

For more information about archival material, see the University Archive website. 

If you have modified or adapted someone else's illustration/image/figure/chart for use in a publication, you may need to obtain permission from the copyright owner. As stipulated in the copyright law, only the copyright owner of a work has the right to authorise the adaptations or the derivation of their work. In the eyes of the law, modifying/adapting an original work is considered as copying the original work.

The conditions under which a derivative/modified work can be used in a publication without permission from the copyright owner is if:

  • The copyright in the image has expired.
  • The image is available under an open licence such as a Creative Commons licensing scheme, which allows adaptation. Make sure to read the terms of the license.
  • The new work is significantly different to the original work.

For a new work to be considered significantly different from a pre-existing work, it must incorporate some or all of the pre-existing work and add significantly new content that is subject to copyright in its own right.

Publishing your scholarly communications: A short introduction

While conducting your research you might be funded. Some funders will require you to publish your research Open Access. The University has a dedicated webpage on support for publishing Open Access.

If your research is funded by UKRI, there is a handy guide on publishing your research on the UKRI webpages on how to deal with third-party copyright. Jisc has also published useful guidelines on using Creative Commons licenses.

The version of a published article (known as the version of record) that appears in a journal is usually the definitive final record of published research for which the publisher owns exclusive publication rights. In other words, they are the copyright owner.

As a rule of thumb, unless it is part of the copyright agreement or your funder/institution has paid an open access fee, commonly known as an Article Processing Charge or Article Publishing Charge (APC), it is not advisable to upload a published article to any Academic Social Networking websites such as ResearchGate or Academia.edu. Uploading a PDF of the published paper online is, in effect, republishing it which is a right restricted to a copyright owner. Depending on the publisher’s licence, an author may be free to upload the author manuscript (after peer review) to personal websites, an employer’s research repository or share a copy via an email with a colleague.

For clarification, check the publisher's website for its author posting policy or the Sherpa Services database.

For more support in promoting your research, get in touch with the Research Repository team. 

Generative Artificial Intelligence material: A new era of technology

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not a new concept and has been in our lives for some time now. Examples include, smartphone or PC digital assistants, online shopping and advertising, robots used in factories, autonomous cars, etc.

The rise and use of Generative AI, like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Google Bard, to name a few has also brought issues relating to copyright. Copyright definition states that for a work to be protected by copyright, it needs to be created by a ‘natural person’. 

In the case of ChatGPT the user owns the output. This is clouded further by the terms of use as OpenAI acknowledges that the output of ChatGPT may not be unique, and therefore multiple users may receive the same or similar results to other users, which raises issues of copyright enforceability between recipients of AI generated content.

Words and ideas generated by some AI tools make use of other, human authors' ideas without referencing them, which, as things stand, is controversial and considered by many to be a form a plagiarism. It is also commonly known that AI’s hallucinate, i.e. they generate something that is not real or true. 

According to UNESCO’s ChatGPT quick guide, there are possible uses of ChatGPT in the research process:

It could be used in:

  1. Research design: generate ideas for research questions or projects; suggest data sources.
  2. Data collection: search archives and datasets; translate sources into other languages.
  3. Data analysis: code data; suggest themes or topics for analysis.
  4. Writing up: improve writing quality; reformat citations and references; translate writing.

One point to make here is that everything that is inputted within these AIs will be used as training data. Make sure you own the data you input and are happy for it to be re-used to train the AIs. Always read the terms and conditions. If in doubt, get in touch with the Copyright and Licensing Manager or the library.

If you have used any Generative AI tool to create a table or figure or text, do make sure you cite it.

Jisc has created advice and guidance on Generative AI in the education sector.

Disclaimer: The information presented in this section does not reflect the views of Loughborough University.

Your work, your IP

Once you have completed your research and decided to publish, you will need to decide what license to use. The University waives all copyright to scholarly communications created by staff in the process of their employment at the University. You can read more about the University copyright policy on the copyright webpages.

In addition, where possible the University requires a copy of every research output to be deposited in the relevant University Repository. You can find more information about Open Access at Loughborough on the dedicated webpages.

Many funders require that research outputs supported by their funding are published under certain licence terms. This usually involves publishing open access under a compliant Creative Commons licence to enable sharing and reuse. 

Make sure you consider your intellectual property rights before signing any agreement with a publisher.

A CTA is a publishing contract or a licencing agreement (exclusive or non-exclusive) that transfers or licences the copyright of a work from an author to a publisher. In academic publishing, this agreement is signed before an author's manuscript is accepted for publication.

The terms of a CTA stipulate how an author can, in whole or in part, reuse their work(s) for future scholarly communications. It also dictates how they can self-archive and share their research content and findings with members of the public. 

Although authors retain the moral rights (i.e. right to attribution) to be identified as the author of the work, the elements of this type of agreement could restrict the scholarly community’s immediate access to an author’s research findings. These restrictions can affect citation, visibility and impact.

However, you can use rights retention language on your Accepted Manuscript (the version of the paper which has gone through peer-review and any corrections have been made but has not gone through publisher typesetting).

When you sign a CTA, make sure that you are happy with its terms and have permission to use any third-party copyrighted material. If you are an established author, you may be able to negotiate the terms of this agreement to receive better rights.

Usually publishers will give you the rights:

  • to archive the final author version (the accepted manuscript after any changes requested by the editor) of your journal article or book chapter in a repository. Loughborough University requires that staff submit a copy of all academic journal articles, conference papers and book chapters to the Research Repository via LUPIN.
  • to disseminate individual copies to colleagues.
  • to use the work in teaching duties or course packs.

Always remember to check your CTA very carefully.

Copyright and sharing your data: How to be open

The University is committed to research excellence, integrity and openness. Your funder will likely require you to deposit your data in a repository.

Copyright questions you need to consider:​

  • Do you own the copyright in the data created? ​
  • How will the data be licensed for reuse?​
  • Are there copyright restrictions on reuse of third-party data?

More information can be found on the University’s Archiving your data webpages or contact the Open Research Manager for Data and Methods.

There is also a handy guide on data sharing on the University’s repository.

Creative Commons licenses: A short overview

Creative Commons (CC) licenses are a response to an outdated global copyright legal system. As a creator of a work, you can decide what license you apply to your work. You can either keep it with the restrictive All Rights Reserved copyright license which is automatically assigned to a work which is created, or you can opt to choose a more re-use friendly license like the 6 types of Creative Commons licenses.

More information can be found on the Creative Commons website, the Licenses section of this website or the university's Research Support webpage, Licence Types.

Copyright law plays a crucial role in safeguarding the rights of creators while fostering a vibrant intellectual ecosystem. As Higher Education researchers, you have a responsibility to uphold copyright principles, ensuring that your research endeavours are conducted ethically and responsibly. By understanding copyright fundamentals, navigating fair dealing exceptions, and respecting the intellectual property of others, you contribute to a culture of innovation, knowledge sharing, and academic integrity. Embark on your journey of copyright literacy and become a copyright-conscious researcher, advancing knowledge while upholding the principles of intellectual property protection.