Open access, copyright and licensing: basics for open access publishers

permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The purpose of this editorial is to cover as succinctly as possible the basics of copyright and licensing that open access publishers need to know, and to provide some guidance in making decisions in this area. In every country that has signed the Berne Convention (World Intellectual Property Organization, 1995 [1]) author copyright is automatic, extends 50 years after the life of the author, and involves a bundle of rights, including both moral and economic rights. Under Berne, moral rights are not transferred even when authors transfer all economic rights. Berne covers some user rights (for e.g. the right to translate, the right to transform the work through adaptations or arrangements, the right of public performance, the right to recite in public, the right to communicate the performance of works to the public, the right to broadcast, the right to reproduce and the right to use the work as a basis for an audiovisual work), but leaves much to the discretion of each country. For this reason, user rights are variable from one country to another, so it is important for open access publishers to clarify user rights. Although copyright is vested in the author, an author can grant all the rights that a publisher requires through licensing. Copyright transfer is not necessary. A license to publish can be implicit or explicit. An implicit license means even without a contract, when an author has submitted an article for publication and subsequently sent revised drafts after peer review, approved copyedited drafts, etc., the author has implicitly granted a right to publish. However, a simple explicit license clarifying how rights are shared between the author and the publisher is good practice to avoid potential confusion – and is necessary even with Creative Commons licensing. The terms of an author-journal license should address the requirements of both parties. Following are some things that publishers and/or authors commonly look for in scholarly publishing and/or should think about, loosely based on the elements of the Creative Commons (2015) licenses [2]. Attribution: it is common for both the journal and the author to want to be appropriately acknowledged and cited for their work. This can be confusing in the case of Creative Commons licenses, which were originally designed for individual creators. It is good practice to clarify this in …