Copyright and licensing

In Septentrio journals, it is usually the author that retains the copyright. An author grants a journal a non-exclusive license to publish their article under a Creative Commons license. Each journal determines what the default license would be at that journal, but ultimately it's the author who decides which Creative Commons license to choose for their article.

Third-party rights

A manuscript may contain material (image, figure, table) for which the author of the manuscript does not own intellectual property rights. It is important that the rights for this material are cleared by the author before manuscript submission. For further information, see the wikis on marking third-party content and considerations for licensors and licensees.

Commissioned images

Sometimes an editor or author commissions an image from an artist in order to use this image for publication in the journal: for use in an article, or as a cover image for an issue. In this case, the editor/author cannot assume that they or the journal owns the copyright to a work they have ordered and paid for. This is because Norwegian copyright law does not have a "work-for-hire" doctrine, like in the US – there must be an explicit contract in order for copyright transfer to take place.

Copyright transfer, however, is not necessary. What the editor/author needs to do is to inform the artist – at the point of commission – that the image will be used in an Open Access publication and thus needs to be licensed with a Creative Commons license (the copyright remains with the artist). It is the artist that decides which license to choose for their image.

If the artist does not want to license their image, but only allows it to be used in that particular publication, the users/readers of the journal will not be able to reproduce journal content including the image (except for private use).