Skip to Main Content

Open Access @ UCC: Copyright & Licensing

Open access is a broad international movement that seeks to grant free and open online access to academic information, such as publications and data.

Rights Retention

Open Access benefits everyone - Retain your rights

The Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) enables authors to exercise the rights they have on their manuscripts to deposit a copy of the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in a repository on publication and provide open access to it. To help researchers know what they can do SPARC Europe have created a ‘Rights Retention Helper’ .

Who has copyright in my publication?

The first owner of copyright in a work is generally the author. Unless you transfer copyright to a publisher by signing a copyright transfer agreement or an exclusive licence to publish, you will retain copyright over the work.

Follow the steps below to select the appropriate license for your work:

Creative Commons License Chooser

Creative Commons Licensing for Research

Which publishing options are supported by your funder’s OA policy?

Use the Journal Checker Tool to establish your options.

How can I check what an author's rights are?

Where you have transferred copyright to the publisher or another body, you can check the rights holder’s policy with regard to self-archiving in an open access institutional repository in the following ways:

  • Review the copyright transfer agreement/ exclusive licence to publish/ copyright form that you signed during submission of your publication
  • Check the SHERPA RoMEO database online which gives summaries of the permissions that are normally given as part of each journal publisher's copyright transfer agreement. RoMEO does not have information on all journal publishers but it is a good place to start.
  • The publisher's own web site may give information on author’s rights or self-archiving permissions. See Taylor and Francis for example
  • CORA staff will do a copyright check on publications once they have been uploaded to CORA.  Where copyright is not clear, CORA staff contact the rights holder on behalf of the author.

CORA: Notice and Take Down Policy

If you believe you have legitimate grounds to complain about any item in CORA, please notify us by e-mail on cora@ucc.ie

Legitimate grounds of complaint include a belief that inclusion of the item infringes your copyright or your moral rights or is defamatory or is otherwise unlawful.

In the e-mail please include the following information: Name, organisation, e-mail address, postal address, telephone number, reason for requesting withdrawal, title of the item/publication, link to the item on CORA.

On receipt of your e-mail:

  • We will acknowledge your e-mail promptly, normally within 24 hours of receipt.
  • We will remove the file(s) from public view while the complaint is investigated.
  • We will investigate your complaint in full, which may include seeking legal advice where we believe this is necessary.
  • We will inform the original contributor of the item about the nature of your complaint, to give him/her an opportunity to respond.
  • We will endeavour to complete our investigation within 10 working days, but this may not be possible in all cases.
  • We will communicate our decision to you and to the original contributor of the item.
  • If our investigation finds in your favour, we will withdraw the item permanently from CORA.
Library Icon Logo