Copyright and Intellectual Property Policy

When the author holds copyright over an item deposited in BDEARS, the author retains that copyright when it is deposited. All copyright holders must agree to a non-exclusive distribution and preservation license that allows the University Library to disseminate the deposited work over the web and make copies of that work for preservation purposes. The copyright holder may distribute or formally publish their work in the same or different form without obtaining permission or notifying BDEARS staff. The BDEARS page will explicitly state that the deposited work is protected by copyright. BDEARS does not seek or claim copyright on any deposited works, nor does it seek revenue from deposited works.

When the author deposits a work, may note when a work is made available under a Creative Commons license. Authors that wish to consider setting conditions on reuse (outside of fair use) of their materials may wish to see the guide to Creative Commons licenses and the Creative Commons copyright license program https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.

Depositing work in BDEARS automatically provides a time and date stamp that will verify the author’s expression of an idea or document the author’s research at a given point in time.

If the author has signed over copyright to a publisher or other third party, the author may still be able to deposit that work into BDEARS.

More and more publishers, whether commercial or non-profit, will permit the deposit of a pre-print or a post-print online and include this permission into their copyright agreement with authors. If the author would like to know what the publisher permits, should visit the SHERPA-RoMEO https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ database and search or browse for the name of the publisher. If the publisher is not listed in the Sherpa database, the E-Resources and Acquisitions Librarian will help to investigate this issue with the chosen publisher. When the author publishes their works with a publisher, can also negotiate to submit that work to BDEARS. The University Library has additional information and resources to support authors through this process.

Authors with permission to deposit their material into BDEARS, must agree to the terms in the non-exclusive distribution and preservation license for BDEARS. This allows the University Library to disseminate the deposited work over the web and make copies of that work for preservation purposes. If there are specific conditions that the copyright holder makes for the deposit of the material (for example, that it must include the citation information or must be embargoed for a specific period of time), then, the copyright holder must follow those conditions within BDEARS.