3.5 Let Us Sum Up
In this Unit, you have learnt about various provisions of protection of intellectual property rights during the processes of knowledge creation, publishing and dissemination. Electronic publishing environment helps in sharing ones’ scholarly works with global communities. However, copyright of a scholarly work, if transferred to its publishers, may restrict an author to share his/her own works through a global network. On the other hand, authors may obtain some exemptions in using, reusing or sharing their respective works. Research papers published in toll access journals or conference proceedings may be made freely available through self-archiving in institutional or disciplinary repositories. The author needs to know the journal’s self-archiving policy, i.e., whether allowing pre-print or post-print or publishers’ version to be self-archived. Author should also know whether a journal is having an embargo period restricting self-archiving for a certain period after publishing. Of late, Creative Commons (CC) licenses facilitate authors to enjoy certain liberty in sharing, using, reusing, distribution and modification. When an author shares his/her ‘just published’ research paper in social media, personalized researcher’s profile and online forums, it comes with much higher possibilities of getting read or noticed by co-researchers working in the same or allied research areas. All six types of CC licenses give rights to share and fair use. Open licenses help the researchers in global dissemination of public funded research results for effective delivery of public goods and services. The publishing and academic databases industries have strengthened their digital rights management (DRM) tools for detecting copyright violations and plagiarisms in the vicinity of academic publishing. The fair use culture needs to inculcate in academic researcher communities in order to bring transparent publications ethics in the process of scholarly communications, particularly in the electronic environment.