Intellectual Property

The new information and communication technologies have given rise to new forms of publication and dissemination, thanks to the ease of reproduction and the speed of communication, so that the paradigm on which intellectual property and, with it, copyright were based has been overtaken by the new context. The inadequacy of the traditional concept of copyright and the instruments for its defense have made it necessary to create new tools adapted to the new scenario that allow the defense of the author’s rights.

The exploitation or economic rights are transferable and may be assigned to third parties. This assignment may be made to publishers, exclusively or not, or to users.

Assignment to publishers

Assignment to publishers implies the transfer of copyright with the signing of a contract or license between the parties, which must specify the counterparts, term, territory,…

This assignment may be made on an exclusive basis so that the transfer of rights will have a term equal to that of the economic rights (which vary according to the intellectual property legislation in force in each country) and in which the publisher obtains the full exploitation rights of that work.

If the assignment is non-exclusive, we speak of licenses in which the conditions of exploitation of the work are established between the author and the publisher.

Assignment to readers

The assignment to users or readers is done through licenses of use in which the author indicates which rights are reserved and which are assigned. The best known and most used are the Creative Commons licenses, although there are others, and the author can always establish the license in his own terms (indicating in any case which rights are reserved, temporal validity and geographical scope if applicable).

A license is a legal instrument (agreement/contract) that expresses copyright and indicates what can and cannot be done with an intellectual work. Licensing is the power of the author of the work.

According to the RAE plagiarizing is copying in substance other people’s works, giving them as one’s own. It implies the appropriation of the authorship of a work (or part of it, such as a paragraph or sentence) by not indicating the origin or citing the original source.

It is an infringement of copyright (moral right of authorship) and, even more so in our environment, it is very important to avoid it and to be academically honest.

The Open Access exposes plagiarism because on the Internet it is much easier to detect it, especially in scientific communication, thanks precisely to the open nature of dissemination: the more people specialized in a subject read articles on that subject, the easier it will be to detect misuse. In this respect, we could say that the greater the dissemination, the greater the protection.

There are different situations in which plagiarism is committed, such as not to point out the authorship of the author presenting his ideas as our own or buying a work from a third party signing it as its own. It is worth mentioning theself-plagiarism in which the author presents as unpublished ideas or results that are no more than a recycling of previous works.

We may find that the author has not assimilated or has not known how to summarize the text of a third party, or simply does not know how to use quotations or references. In this case we would speak of unconscious plagiarism. Whether it is due to ignorance or with full awareness of the fact, we will speak of plagiarism.

To avoid plagiarism or academic dishonesty we must reference correctly, using quotation marks if it is an exact quotation and always indicating the source both in the quotation and in the paraphrase.

You should also avoid “making up” quotations, i.e., quoting authors you have not read or attributing ideas or conclusions to authors that do not really correspond to them.

Legislation and resources

Plagiarism is included both in the Intellectual Property Law (art.2 and art.6) and in the Penal Code (art.270.1).

The Universitat Politècnica de València addresses the issue of plagiarism in the paper Scientific integrity policy and best practices in research at the Universitat Politècnica de València identifying it as one of the totally unacceptable scientific malpractices.

The office of Research Integrity of the U.S. health service offers Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing. a comprehensive guide to ethical scientific writing and academic honesty to avoid plagiarism, self-plagiarism and other bad practices.

For more information, please consult:

• The document How to use information ethically prepared by the UPV Library.
• What is plagiarism and how can we avoid it? of the Servei de Biblioteques i Documentació de la Universitat de València.

Avoiding plagiarism
To avoid being plagiarized we can include metadata in texts and images or watermarks in the documents. It is also advisable to include the citation of the document in it, which will guarantee a correct citation, while preventing the text from being “orphaned”, i.e., that it reaches the reader out of context, through a search engine, for example, making a correct citation very difficult.

If we are the ones who receive a text for evaluation on the Internet, there are different tools that allow us to detect plagiarism. Here are the best known ones (extracted in part from Plagiarism detection tools compilation).

Commercials:

Copy Scape
https://copyscape.com/
DOT Cop
https://www.doccop.com/
ephorus
https://www.ephorus.com/
Nimisis
https://es.nimisis.com/software/collusion.php
Plagiarism
https://www.plagiarism.com
Plagiarims-detector
https://www.plagiarism-detector.com/
PlagScan
https://plagscan.com/
Scanmyessay
https://www.scanmyessay.com/
Turnitin
https://www.turnitin.com
Urkund
https://www.urkund.com/int/en/

Free:

Chimpsky
https://chimpsky.uwaterloo.ca/
Copyscape
https://www.copyscape.com
JPlag
https://www.ipd.uni-karlsruhe.de/jplag/
Plagium
https://www.plagium.com/

Recommendations for publishers

The editorial policy should be clear, easily found and identifiable. You should check that the information that appears in Sherpa/Romeo is correct. The editor must be very clear about the fundamental concepts of the new scientific publication and the advantages that can be found in Open Access.

Recommendations for authors

One of the main concerns of authors when self-archiving their publications in a repository is related to copyright and whether or not they have permission to make their articles openly available. It is very important that authors maintain their rights and that they analyze very well the type of contract or assignment of rights that they sign with the publisher, as well as choosing the publisher well. We recommend the following sections Choose where to publish y Where not to publish.

Some recommendations to maintain the rights to the works would be:

• Read contracts/agreements carefully before signing them.
• Contact the publisher if you feel that the agreement is too restrictive to attempt to negotiate some exceptions.
• Modifying the agreement signed with the publisher. There are institutions that provide model contracts so that authors can establish the rights they wish to retain over their works. Another possibility is to add a addendum to the contract, specifying which rights are to be retained. There are help tools that provide authors with model contracts or addenda, such as:

1. Addendum models for research project financing entities.
   • The European Research Council (ERC) recommends (March 2017) the use of a model addendum, optional and complementary, for publication agreements (Copyright Transfer Agreement) with publishers in order to comply with Horizon 2020 embargo periods (based on a similar document for FP7). This model document can be adapted for use in complying with other institutional mandates.
2. Other models of addenda:
   • Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine of the Science Commons project
   • SPARC Author Addendum
   • A extended list is available in the Open Access Directory
3. Check the publisher’s copyright policies and open access self-archiving permissions:
   • Actively support journals with more open rights agreements.
   • The self-archiving permissions (in repositories, etc.) allowed by the various publishers can be consulted in the following databases Sherpa/RoMEO y Dulcinea (for Spanish journals) that specify the publisher’s copyright policies and permissions for open access self-archiving.
   • Apply open user licenses, type Creative Commonsto our publications.

RiuNet offers authors a channel for the diffusion of their works while respecting all their moral and exploitation copyrights.

Copyright belongs to the author of the work by the mere fact of its creation. The rights of moral content are unrenounceable and inalienable. Those of economic content, or exploitation rights, may be assigned to third parties, as in the case of published works in which the author assigns part or all of his exploitation rights to the publishing house.

Both unpublished and published works can be deposited in RiuNet.

In the case of unpublished works the author simply authorizes the University to disseminate his document through the repository, by signing a contract, but retains all rights to his work, so that it can be published later in any journal, publishing house, etc. There is a possibility that some publishers may only accept previously unpublished works, for this reason it is advisable to know the policy of the publishers where you plan to publish. The policy of most international publishers can be consulted in the Sherpa/Romeo database and that of Spanish publishers in the Dulcinea database.

At the time of self-archiving the document, the author can decide on the subsequent use of his work by those who can consult it on the Internet through a Creative Commons license, or he can maintain the reservation of all his rights.

In the case of works already published before including them in the repository, the author should know the conditions under which he/she has transferred the exploitation rights of his/her work to the publisher. Although most publishers allow the filing of the pre-print (the draft of the text to be published before peer review), it is recommended to consult the following databases Sherpa/Romeo y Dulcinea to learn about the copyright policy of Spanish publishers.

In case of doubt, the author should contact the publisher to know its policy regarding archiving in institutional repositories.

If the work to be deposited has several authors, the procedure will depend on whether the work is a collaborative work The joint result of the work of several authors, in which case it is necessary that all of them authorize its diffusion through RiuNet by signing the contract, or a collective work created under the initiative and coordination of a single person, in which case it is sufficient that the main author authorizes its dissemination in the repository.

Contract models in RiuNet

Framework agreement for the assignment of copyrights of digital works in RiuNet
If you are a member of the UPV you do not need to sign a contract for each deposit, by signing this framework agreement it is valid for each deposit.

Contract for the deposit of doctoral theses.

Authorization for the dissemination of academic papers.

For any questions you can contact us at:

Library and Scientific Documentation. New Technologies

riunet@bib.upv.es Phone 34 96 387 70 85 ext. 78854