Carleton’s copyright policy

Usually, employers own works created by their employees, but in academic institutions, policies may change that. Carleton’s copyright policy affirms that faculty, staff, and students own the copyrights for their academic works, including instructional content and submitted coursework.

Exceptions

There are a few exceptions for Carleton employees. Carleton owns the copyright for works that are specifically directed or commissioned by the College or produced as a specific job requirement. Examples include:

  • Articles or other publications written by Communications Office staff
  • Computer software developed by technical staff
  • The work of a faculty member on special assignment to write a history of the College while receiving full salary

Co-authoring and collaboration

For collaborative works that can’t be split into separately authored pieces, each co-author shares joint ownership of the entire work. Joint owners do have some limited legal responsibilities to each other, such as sharing profits. But each author can exercise any of the rights of the copyright owner and can transfer or license the work. As a practical matter co-authors should definitely check with and inform their co-authors of what they’re doing with shared works.

Retaining your rights

Copyright ownership is often completely unrelated to credit, citation, or attribution for a work. For example, an author may have ceded the rights to a journal article to a publisher, but they are still the author.

Authors should be aware that they may be able to retain rights when their work is published and distributed. The retained rights will enable you to continue using the publications in your academic work (including posting copies online). To retain your rights, you can either sign an author agreement with your publisher or find an Open Access publisher in your field. Gould Library maintains an excellent resource on Open Access publishing.

A typical author agreement might say “The Author grants to [the publisher] a royalty-free, non-exclusive right to publish and distribute the articles in all forms of media.” Usually these agreements will stipulate ways that you should credit the publisher for first publication in any future sharing or modification. (See an example of a successful author agreement for a journal article.)