According to copyright law, the copyright belongs to the creator(s) of the work. If the work has multiple authors, the copyright is shared among all the creators of that particular work (e.g., article/publication). Copyright always belongs to natural persons (individuals); for example, a research group cannot act as a collective copyright holder.
Copyright protection requires that the work exceeds the threshold of originality, meaning it must be sufficiently original. In practice, scientific publications always meet this threshold and are protected by copyright.
Copyright includes both economic and moral rights. Economic rights include the right to make copies of the work and distribute them. Moral rights include the right of attribution (the right to be named as the author of the work) and the right to respect for the work (the right to have the work treated with integrity). The economic rights of a work can be transferred to, for example, a publisher, but moral rights (right of attribution/respect) cannot be waived.
If a publication or research data has multiple authors, they must agree on the order and criteria by which authors will be listed. The starting point for authorship is that the person whose name is listed on the publication has made a significant contribution to the creation of the work.
For further information: Agreeing on authorship. Recommendation for research publications. Finnish Advisory Board on Research Integrity 2018 (PDF)
Publishers often offer authors agreements in which they are required to waive all economic rights to their work. However, this is not advisable. It is recommended that authors retain the right to self-archive their article in either the university’s or their discipline’s repository. The preferred version for self-archiving is the "final draft", which is the peer-reviewed version of the article published in the journal but without the publisher’s formatting.Libraries check publishers' self-archiving permissions and deposit articles according to the publisher's terms.
It is a good idea to agree on self-archiving in a repository during the article writing phase. If you want to self-archive an already published article, permission must be requested from all authors, as copyright belongs to all authors of the article.
PhD researchers should ensure, at the publication agreement stage, that their article can be included as part of their dissertation.
Sharing the original publication on various social media platforms, such as ResearchGate, is considered an activity under Copyright Law. Therefore, researchers should ensure they have the right to share the article on these platforms.
Third-party copyrighted material
An article may include material that is copyrighted by a third party, such as illustrations or graphics. The author must obtain permission for all elements included in the article from the respective copyright holders.
The Aalto University Image OA guide on open science and image usage clarifies the copyright issues related to images.
A licence is a permission granted by the rights holder for a specific publication, database, or other material. The licence provides the user who accepts it with certain usage rights while also restricting their actions under specific conditions.
In open publishing, licences are used to define how published content can be used, shared, modified, and utilised. The most common open publishing licences are based on Creative Commons (CC) licences.
A licence is indicated alongside the publication, such as an article or a book, or it may apply to all material within a specific service.
More information: Guidelines for researchers and scholarly publishers on open licensing (2020, in Finnish)
The world's most widely used open licensing system is Creative Commons (CC), which was established in 2001. An open licence is a pre-formulated permission for use. A CC licence specifies the rights related to the distribution, modification, and further utilization of a work. Using a Creative Commons licence does not mean relinquishing one's rights but rather granting others the right to use the work under conditions defined by the creator.
The Creative Commons licence recommended for open science is CC-BY (Attribution).
Guidelines for selecting and marking CC licences:
