Two attestations in the license are prompts to ensure that submitters do not violate copyright law:
The copyright holder of any work submitted to IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks retains copyrights to the work. Submission to IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks imposes no restrictions on your future use of the work. However, it is a good idea to be explicit about what others can and cannot do with your work by applying a license to it. Creative Commons provides an easy way to license your work. With the exception of CC0, all Creative Commons licenses require that any use of your work is credited to you. In many cases, either the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY NC) are good choices for content, but the choice depends on the goals and concerns of the author and future publication plans (see "prior publication," below).
The other Creative Commons licenses options depend on how each of the following two questions are answered in the submission process:
| Allow commercial uses of your work? | ||
| Allow modifications of your work? | No* | Yes |
| Share-alike | CC BY-NC-SA | CC BY-SA |
| No** | CC BY-NC-ND | CC BY-ND |
| Yes | CC BY-NC | CC BY |
* The licensor permits others to copy, distribute and transmit the work. In return, licensees may not use the work for commercial purposes – unless they get the licensor's permission.
** The licensor permits others to copy, distribute and transmit only unaltered copies of the work – not derivative works based on it.
If you choose to apply a Creative Commons license to your work, we also recommend that you include the license you select within the work itself.
Selecting "No Creative Commons License," results in the author or copyright holder retaining all copyrights in the submitted work. Application of a Creative Commons license to a work may be requested at any time by the copyright holder, by contacting the Center for Digital Scholarship.
For data sets, we recommend you consult IU Indianapolis DataWorks.
If you are posting a paper that has or will be published in a journal, check the journal's copyright and self-archiving policy before submitting the work to IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks. The Sherpa Romeo database provides a way to look up a journal's policies. A common publisher requirement for posting pre-publication papers is that the record also include a link to the publisher's version. Most journal articles can be uploaded in a version that predates the publisher's layout and design, sometimes called the "accepted manuscript" or "preprint." Many publishers require an embargo on file downloads for 12 months or more.
