Introduction

Copyright is an automatic right in the UK for authors of a work that has been created and fixed in a particular format. The copyrighted works that are commonly published by researchers in Higher Education are books, book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. More subject-specific works might be computer programmes, plays or music scores.

As a researcher, once the research has been concluded, there are different ways that the research is disseminated. This might be by presenting a poster at a conference, submitting an article to a peer-reviewed journal, writing a book chapter in an edited collection or publishing the research as a monograph. There are copyright considerations in all of these.

When publishing with any commercial or university academic publisher, for example, Taylor and Francis, Wiley or Elsevier or Liverpool University Press, to name just a few, a publishing contract is agreed on and this will include who has the copyright of the work. Even before this, when compiling your work, whether it be a journal article or book chapter, the publisher will expect the author to have considered the copyright relating to any third-party materials such as images or diagrams and seek permission in advance from the rights' holder if including them. Publishers provide guidance on their website and will have a contact who can guide authors through this process.

When a work such as a journal article or book chapter is published, it is shared so that others can make use of the work. Users of the work know how they can reuse the work in a way that was intended by the copyright holder through the licence that it has. If it is an article published in a subscription journal, then this might be the publisher's bespoke licence. Were as if it is an article published in an open-access journal, it will usually be published with a creative commons' licence. If a researcher has funder requirements to meet, this can often include using a particular creative commons' licence. Researchers can check the funder websites to ensure any funder requirements in relation to licensing are met. For example, Welcome funding licence requirements are explained on the Wellcome website. More frequently, funders require the most permissive licence, CC BY.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used not just by researchers themselves in their research processes, maybe in the collecting of large data, or by publishers in the publishing process, to improve efficiency in their manuscript submission systems. As the use of AI increases, so will the guidance in this area. Authors need to be clear about how, if any, use that they are making of AI and keep up to date with developments in this area. There are details about copyright and AI on the UK government website.