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Please note: Authors who have submitted their works to the Buffalo State Digital Commons retain all proprietary rights, including copyright ownership. Any editing, reproduction, or other use of materials in the Digital Commons by any means requires the express written consent of the copyright holder.
Submissions and Copyright
Under the Berne Convention, as soon as you save your document in a tangible form, it is copyright protected, whether or not you register for copyright, affix a copyright statement, or submit your work for publication.For the duration of your life plus 70 years, copyright law gives you exclusive rights to make copies, distribute your work, display or perform your work publicly, and make derivative works. Anyone who reads or views your work needs permission from you to exercise any of these rights; elsewise they have committed copyright infringement.
Should your copyright ever be infringed upon, you would need to register your work with the U.S. Copyright Office before you could sue for infringement. Though you may register at any time (even after the infringement occurs), registering copyright beforehand allows the copyright holder to sue for statutory damages and attorney's fees; otherwise, only the cost of actual damages will be awarded.You can register for copyright online for $35 via the U.S. Copyright Office. Most theses and student scholarship contained in institutional repositories like the Digital Commons is not registered, but you may want to consult your advisor if you believe your research is truly original and potentially subject to infringement.
Submitting your work to the Buffalo State institutional repository in no way encumbers your copyright. With your submission, you agree to give E. H. Butler Library a limited license to store and make your work accessible.Though this would traditionally have involved placing a printed copy of your work on a library shelf, now your work is electronically stored as a PDF in the Digital Commons and is, by default, accessible on the World Wide Web. If you are uncomfortable with this mode of access, you may choose to limit accessibility during the submission process by choosing the "Campus Access Only" option.Before doing this, however, please consider a few advantages of making your work openly accessible as an electronic theses or pre-print:
- Broader exposure of your work
- Use of hyperlinks and color graphics in your work to draw attention and web traffic to your interests
- Greater accessibility and potential for relationships with like-minded scholars
Fair Use
Copyright law restricts how others may use your work.By the same token, it also restricts how you may use others' work in your scholarship.Fair use is an exemption within copyright law whereby a portion of a protected work can be used without obtaining rights from the author or copyright holder. Quoting a journal article and citing the author in a non-commercial work is one example of fair use. Determining fair use involves four factors, which are stipulated in Section 107 of Title 17 of the United States Code. Take a moment to read that section. If your use of a copyright protected work exceeds those bounds, you will need written permission from the copyright holder, or you may procure rights from the Copyright Clearance Center. As with any published work, whether in print or electronic form, including copyright protected material in your work - from text, to images, to figures or tables - necessitates that those materials are unequivocally in the public domain, or that their usage falls within the realm of fair use.
Creative Commons Licenses
Because copyright protection limits usage rights so completely ("all rights reserved"), and because the four factors of fair use are subject to interpretation, many academic authors will obtain a Creative Commons license for their work so that they may explicitly grant certain usages such as permission to download a copy for academic purposes only. To learn more about these licensing options, go to the Creative Commons website.
Publishers: Transferring and Retaining Copyright
Theses and pre-prints can become the basis of published books or journal articles. Some publishers will require that previous versions of your scholarship not be accessible on the web as a condition of publication.These book or journal publishers may ask that you "take-down" the electronic version of your thesis or pre-print and sign a copyright agreement transferring all rights to the publisher. Other publishers recognize that the editing process substantially changes a work and let the author keep the right to "self-archive" their original work in a repository such as the Digital Commons. To see which publishers allow for self-archiving, please vist the SHERPA/RoMEO site and search for the publisher or journal title.
If you feel that your thesis may imminently be accepted for publication by a journal that does not allow self-archiving, during the Digital Commons submission process, you may want to place a two year embargo on your work so that only the citation is available online. After two years, your thesis would then be available online.
Should you like to change your submission at a future date and make your thesis or pre-print "campus only access" (the equivalent of fulfilling a take-down notice) please contact E. H. Butler Library at to begin the process.
