Institutional Repository Services

Reuse Licensing in Georgia Southern Commons & SelectedWorks

Unless your work is "made for hire," you retain exclusive copyright over your work until copyright protection for the work expires, you transfer one or more copyright rights to another party, or you license another party to make specific use of your work. In order to deposit your work in Georgia Southern Commons or in your SelectedWorks profile, you must hold copyright for your work or otherwise have sufficient permission from the copyright holder to grant Georgia Southern Commons a minimally sufficient license to publish your work.

Georgia Southern Commons does not knowingly archive or distribute works in violation of United States copyright law or copyright agreements between authors and publishers. In any instance where a work is archived in Georgia Southern Commons that violates copyright restrictions, the work will be removed and the contributor notified. All University employees are subject to the University System of Georgia Policy on the Use of Copyrighted Works in Education and Research and the Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer Policy of the University.

For guidance determining whether you have sufficient rights to deposit your work in Georgia Southern Commons, please consult the library's article on Author Rights & Self-Archiving. If you hold sufficient rights, please review our licensing recommendations below prior to transferring your work to Georgia Southern Commons for archiving and distribution. If depositing your work is not possible due to copyright or licensing restrictions, a citation, abstract, and link to the published version of your work may be added to the repository.

Licensing Work Submitted to Georgia Southern Commons

To properly administrate works archived in, and openly distributed from, Georgia Southern University’s open-access institutional repository, including Georgia Southern Commons and SelectedWorks, Georgia Southern University requires certain permissions from you, the copyright owner or appropriate licensee of any work you submit for inclusion in the repository. You should never submit works for which you do not have sufficient rights or permission to do so.

When you submit a work to the repository, numerous collections/publications will require that you assign a particular reuse license to your work. For example, a peer-reviewed journal published in Georgia Southern Commons may require that you assign a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) to your article as a condition of publication. These collections/publications will note any licensing requirements in their submission agreements.

In most cases, in order to maximize the likelihood that your work will be cited and reused by other researchers, the library recommends that you assign any of the Creative Commons 4.0 International licenses to your work at the time of submission to the repository. If the collection/publication to which you are submitting your work permits you to select your own license, you should see these options in the submission agreement or the submission form.

If the collection/publication to which you are submitting your work neither specifies a required license nor permits you to select your own license, then by submitting your work to the repository, you grant the University a non-exclusive license to publish your work as outlined in the Submission Agreement for Georgia Southern Commons.

Of course, in order to accommodate the various needs of copyright holders, the Repository supports archiving and distribution of copyrighted materials under an array of access and reuse licensing options. If the above options do not accommodate your project or licensing needs, the Georgia Southern Commons Team can work with you to develop a custom license. All custom licenses developed in collaboration with Repository personnel will be submitted to University Counsel for approval. Contact the Georgia Southern Commons Team (digitalcommons@georgiasouthern.edu) with any questions.

For licensing advice particular to data and datasets, see the library’s guide to Basic Intellectual Property Rights in Data Management.

Liaison & Presenter Tools

For help, contact the Georgia Southern Commons Team at digitalcommons@georgiasouthern.edu. A member of the Georgia Southern Commons Team will respond as soon as possible during regular business hours.