According to the United States Copyright Office, copyright is a bundle of exclusive rights awarded to the creator of an original work authorship. These rights include the ability to copy a work, display it publicly, perform it, and create derivative works based on it.
A creative work of authorship is simply any work that contains a certain amount of inventiveness and is fixed into a tangible medium of expression, such as being written on a sheet of paper, saved to a hard drive, or otherwise made permanent. Written works, paintings, pictures, music records, movies, and much more are all covered by copyright.
Many things, including names, facts, and ideas, cannot be copyrighted. While other types of intellectual property, such as trademarks and patents, can protect these in some situations, they cannot be protected under copyright.
This copyright, in turn, restricts how the paper can be used by others. No one else can lawfully post it on a website, share it in a journal, or even utilize long sections of it for their own research without permission from the copyright holder, generally the author. While short quotes may be protected by fair use, which is an exception to the copyright holder’s exclusive rights, copyright nevertheless restricts the use of lengthier parts and the development of derivative works. Copyright, on the other hand, is treated the same as any other property. A copyrighted work can be licensed for use by others, as well as sold or given away.
This agreement, as well as how the magazine decides to use the rights it receives, has a big impact on how an article is circulated and what other people can do with it. This, in turn, has a considerable impact on the dissemination of scientific knowledge.
Research and Copyright
While copyright cannot be used to limit access to facts and information discovered during research, it can be used to limit access to the research itself.
The most prevalent strategy has been to simply limit who has access to the article. Many non-open access publications would make articles available exclusively to subscribers, and because copyright prohibits copying and public exhibition of the papers, no one else could lawfully produce copies for other sites or journals.
There are, however, various ways that copyright can limit access to research. Long quotations or repeating a large amount of a document, even with attribution, may be unlawful because it is an infringement to make derivative works based on a copyrighted work without authorization. Doing meta analyses and repeating results can become more difficult as a result of this.
Creative Commons and other open licenses get past these problems by allowing anybody, including other researchers, to copy and build on the work. This ensures that the study is always publicly available because it can be freely reproduced and shared, and that anyone who wants to build on it won’t have to worry about copyright issues.
Conclusion
In the end, scientific publishing is a business, and that business is built on copyright, regardless of the model used by the publisher.
However, the publisher’s and researcher’s decisions will have a significant impact on who has access to the research and what they can do with it. While copyright decisions may have been made for reasons unrelated to the research, they are an important element in determining what happens to the research after it is published.
For scholars, copyright isn’t going away anytime soon. The impact of the law will only increase as open access gains traction and disputes over copyright get more heated.
As a result, copyright awareness is critical for researchers. Not only so they don’t get in trouble when they publish their work, but also so they can grasp the laws that govern the company that distributes it.
Aishwarya Says:
I have always been against Glorifying Over Work and therefore, in the year 2021, I have decided to launch this campaign “Balancing Life”and talk about this wrong practice, that we have been following since last few years. I will be talking to and interviewing around 1 lakh people in the coming 2021 and publish their interview regarding their opinion on glamourising Over Work.
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