According to the Finnish Copyright Act, the creator of the work holds the copyright. If the work has more than one creator, all the creators hold the copyright to the work (e.g. article/publication). The holder of the copyright is always an individual (natural person). For example, a research group cannot hold the copyright to a work.
For the copyright to come into existence, the work has to meet the threshold of originality. In practice, scientific publications always meet the threshold of originality and are under the copyright protection. Copyright includes both economic and moral rights. Economic rights include e.g. the right to manufacture copies of the work. Moral rights include the right to be acknowledged as the creator and the respect right. The economic rights can be assigned/transferred separately, but moral rights cannot be be relinquished.
Authorship always belongs to a natural person in publications and research data. For example, a research group cannot be a collective author. The economic rights within the copyright can be assigned to e.g. the publisher, but the moral rights (right to be acknowledged as the author and the respect right) always belong to a specific person.
If the article/research data has several authors/creators, they have to agree among themselves in which order and with which criteria the authors will be presented in the publication. The basic premise with authorship is that those who are named as authors in the publication have also had an input in the creation of the article.
For more information, please see: Finnish National Board on Research Intregrity TENK: Agreeing on authorship - Recommendation for Research Publications (pdf)
Often, publishers offer contracts where they require that the author gives up all the economic rights to the work. However, you should not agree to these kinds of terms when publishing your research, but retain the right to parallel publishing either in the institutional or a discipline-specific repository. The recommended version for parallel publishing is the final draft, i.e. the peer-reviewed version that is published in the journal but does not have the publisher's layout. The publisher usually permits the parallel publication of a draft in a repository. You can look for information on publishers' copyright/parallel publishing policies in the SHERPA/RoMEO service.
When you upload the final draft in the Research Information System or send it by the online form, the library checks the publisher's permission for parallel publishing.
In open science it is recommended to use Creative Commons (CC) licences. With the Creative Commons licences, the Creator of the work can share their rights with the users to facilitate the use of the work e.g. in teaching or research. Therefore, using a Creative Commons licence does not mean you have to give up your rights, but that you give other people the right to use your work according to the conditions you have stipulated. The Creative Commons licence recommended in open science is CC-BY (CC Attribution).
Co-authors
It is advisable that the authors agree on parallel publishing their article in an open access repository already at the writing stage. If you wish to parallel publish an already published article, you must obtain permission from all co-authors (the copyright belongs to all the authors of the article).
Materials under copyright of a third party
A research article might also include material that is under the copyright of a third party, for example, illustrations and graphics. The author must obtain permission to publish such material online.
Permission from the journal and/or publisher who has published the article earlier
Turku University Library checks the parallel publishing permissions given by journals and publishers and records the articles in accordance with the permit conditions. The author can also check the permissions themselves, e.g. in the SHERPA/RoMEO service.
Please note that all Finnish journals are currently not fully available via the service, so in questions regarding parallel publishing you can also contact the journals directly.
Original publications distributed through different social media channels (for example ResearchGate) are protected by copyright. The researchers must take care of copyright issues when they share publications on social media sites. In many cases it is possible to check the copyright policies of journals and publishers in the SHERPA/RoMEO service or on the publishers' websites.
How Can I share it - information on publishers' policies
Open science and use of images: ImagOA guide - Aalto University guide
