What is OA? How does OA work?

As soon as it has been created, a scientific piece of work is protected by the Federal Act on Copyright CopA , if it is original in character and the result of an intellectual activity. The laws protect the form or the manner in which the idea, the opinion or the discovery are expressed but not the scientific discovery as such.

The copyright is owned by the authors of a scientific work (= authorship is a non-transferable right). Who can claim authorship? According to the guidelines of the Swiss Academies for Arts and Sciences, authorship can be claimed by all persons who have made an important contribution to the planning, execution, evaluation and examination of the research work as well as to the writing.

• The right to use a work is transferable and inheritable (economic aspect of copyright).
• It is permissible to quote from published works as long as the quote is ancillary to the content of the author(s) and clearly marked as a quote, and provided the source is given.
• Copyright expires 70 years after the death of the authors. Before the expiry date, the owners of a copyright can prosecute in the case of any copyright breaches.

In a traditional publication system there are two types of publisher agreements:

• Authors assign their economic rights to the publisher. As a result, the publisher has the right to prosecute third parties in the event of any copyright breaches, including prosecution of the authors themselves.
• Alternatively, authors can grant publishing companies the right to use their intellectual property by signing a licence agreement. The authors retain the economic rights to their work.

The SNSF recommends that researchers read publisher agreements carefully to make sure that they only transfer rights to the publisher which the publisher needs to deliver a service. Among other things, this is key in ensuring that the requirements of the “green road” to open access are met (researchers self-archive their scientific publications in an institutional or disciplinary repository, usually after an embargo period). Authors also need to know that the transfer of non-transferable rights (e.g. the right to be recognised as the author of a work) is not compatible with Swiss law.

Open access publishing and copyright laws are not contradictory! A common approach to open access publishing aims to ensure that researchers grant licences instead of transferring any rights. By opting for licencing, the researchers ensure that the scientific work can be accessed and used worldwide.

In open access publishing, the most frequently used licences are so-called Creative Commons (CC) licences. The SNSF does not specify which licences should be used for articles or book chapters, but for monographs and anthologies that are published in gold OA with SNSF funding (publications are openly, freely and immediately accessible in the internet), a CC BY-NC-ND is the minimum requirement. A CC-BY licence is recommended.

What is the aim of Creative Commons? The non-profit organisation, founded in 2001, provides free standard licences that are predestined for use on the internet. They include:

1. a code that can be read by machines (e.g. search engines)
2. easily understandable symbols and abbreviations for users
3. a detailed legal licence text in over 60 languages
   (serving as the basis in legal disputes)

All CC licences are non-exclusive and irrevocable. They all require that authors have to be given credit – as symbolised by the pictogram ‘BY‘. This requirement is legally binding in Switzerland but not in all other countries (e.g. USA).

By adding further components, the further use of a work can be restricted; these components can be added to the licence individually or in combinations.

• NC (for non-commercial): This component (represented by the stroked dollar sign) prohibits all further use for commercial purposes unless the author explicitly gives permission to do so.
• ND (for non-derivative): This component (represented by the = symbol) only allows for the use of the work in its original form.
• SA (for share alike): This component (represented by the recycling symbol) specifies that exactly the same licence has to be used in all further use of the work.

Unless the licence specifies that no changes may be made to the original (ND), it has to be marked if changes were made.

This modular system results in six standard licences that are represented in the following illustrations (source: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-types-examples/).