Licensing & Agreements

Welcome to our Licensing & Agreements section!

 

Efpalinos Publishing adopts open access policies for its (meta)journals, while it encourages the authors and creators, for all other products, to publish their works with open licences. While copyright remains to the creators, selecting an open licence means that the material, either the content of digital objects or data, is available for free and without other restrictions and therefore enhancing visibility, ensuring proper attribution and thus accelerating knowledge.

 

Copyright provides an exclusive legal right to the creator of an original work, the copyright owner, to determine whether and under which conditions the work could be reproduced, published, adapted, communicated or performed and generally used by others. Thus, for allowing others to use works and research outputs of a copyright holder, these need to be licensed legally. The selection of the most suitable type of licence for assigning to digital objects and data, is determined by the copyright owner, the researcher or institution that publish the digital resource and by the policies adopted. An open and less restrictive licence is generally preferred, in order to increase sharing and reuse of data, collaboration and proper attribution.

Digital Objects – Data

Significantly, research data has become part of scholarly publications, transforming radically scholarly communication and research processes and notably improving knowledge discovery and innovation. The definition of both primary sources, data and research data depends on the context and discipline they are used and so a distinction between primary material and research data is not clear, as it is not with ‘data’.

 

Digital Objects 

 

LITERATURE, IMAGES, SOUND, VIDEO, 3D MODELS

Primary sources are the raw materials of research that provide evidence about an agent, object or event, including artefacts, such as coins and inscriptions, letters, manuscripts and other original text documents, newspaper articles, sound and video recording, photographs, interviews, research data, among many other types, which might be found either in the original analogue format in archives and museums but also captured or created in digital forms. Moreover, secondary sources describe, explain, analyse, interpret, comment and evaluate primary sources and historical events, including bibliographies, biographical works, encyclopedias and dictionaries, scholarly books, journal articles and monographs.

 

 

Data

 

DATABASES, DATA TABLES,  DATA SHEETS, SPREADSHEETS, SOFTWARE, ETC.

Research data is the raw material generated or created as part of the research process, which is necessary in order to examine and pursue research questions with the use of digital technologies, while it might be used again to further research. Research data could be in textual and numerical or in other forms, such as images, audio and video recordings, databases, geospatial, or it could be generated by machines and instruments. Besides datasets, research data includes associated grey literature, software, algorithms and analytical workflows. Essentially, all parts of the research process that play role in producing the data are considered integral parts and should be treated carefully as the data itself. Humanities research data includes, among others, written text documents, manuscripts and transcripts, OCR text files extracted from a text corpus, images of archival items or artworks, audio and video recordings, but also geospatial coordinates including raster and vector files, archival metadata, citations, software code, algorithms, digital tools, documentation, databases, reports and articles.

 

Licences

Selecting a licence for digital objects and data is an absolute requirement for publishing, accessing and reusing content on the web. Applying Creative Commons licences to digital objects and data, is the most simple, straightforward and standardised way for ensuring that digital resources will be reused properly by others. However, the use of Creative Commons licences is highly recommended for digital objects and Open Knowledge licences for data and databases. Taking under consideration copyright restrictions, an open and less restrictive licence is generally preferred, in order to increase sharing and reuse of data, collaboration and proper attribution.

 

For selecting the proper licence for your work, check the Licences below.

 

Creative Commons

 

Creative Commons licences give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law.

 

Creative Commons (CC) is the leading organization that supports the global movement for sharing and collaboration in the Web. Creative Commons creates, maintains, and promotes the Creative Commons licences, which are free, international, easy-to-use copyright licences. Their purpose is to permit the public, with a simple and standardised way, to share and use a creative work on conditions determined by the creator of the work.

Find out more about the CC licences here

 

 

Open Knowledge

 

Open Knowledge International through the Open Definition project sets outs principles that define openness with respect to knowledge and in relation to data and content, ensuring quality and encouraging compatibility between different open material.

 

Open Knowledge International has published through Open Data Commons a list of open licences, which are applied especially to data/databases.

The full list of licences and remarks on the openness of data and metadata from Open Data Commons is available here

 

 

Open Source Initiative (OSI)

 

Open Source Initiative (OSI) provides standards and licences for open source code, software, project and communities.

The full list of OSI licences is available here

 

 

Other Licences

 

Other approved licences for free cultural works include the CERN Open Hardware Licence, the MIT License, the GNU General Public License, and the copyleft GNU Free Documentation License, among others. On that note, copyleft is distinguished by copyright and it is the synonym of ShareAlike in the Creative Commons vocabulary, meaning that all derived works must be distributed under the same terms as the original work, usually with the same exact licence.

 

 

RightsStatements.org

 

RightsStatements.org provides 12 standardized rights statements for online cultural heritage. The rights statements make it easy to see if and how online cultural heritage works can be reused.

Find out more about the statements here

 

Agreements

For submitting your work or review for publication, you need first to sign the licensing agreement, which declares the licence you have selected for the online access to your content. By signing the licensing agreement, you agree that metadata of the digital object or data is available under a CC0 licence.

 

Licensing Agreement

 

Read the Licensing Agreement in PDF here.

 

Ιf you have any questions, please contact:

Anastasia Gasia

Publisher, Efpalinos Publishing

email: agasia[at]efpalinospublishing.com