Who owns the copyright to my research article?
In Finland, the copyright to a research article principally belongs to its author or authors.
english translation marko saajanaho
Copyright is always granted to an individual and includes both financial and moral rights (such as naming the author).
In principle, an employment relationship does not automatically transfer copyright to the employer, although the employer may be granted rights related to the use of the work to the extent their operations require.
May I upload my article to the university’s publication archive?
This depends on the publishing contract negotiated with the publisher or whether the prior licence/Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) model applies to your organisation.
If the article is published behind a paywall, the last peer-reviewed manuscript version (Author Accepted Manuscript, AAM) is typically saved in the publication archive. If the article is published with the open Creative Commons licence, the final version published by the publisher (Version of Record, VoR) may be self-archived to the extent allowed by the licence.
It should be noted that self-archiving or parallel publishing is not a new or exceptional practice in Finland and has already been commonplace for decades. Most peer-reviewed articles from recent years have been self-archived according to their publishers’ publishing contract and parallel publishing terms.
What does rights retention mean?
In practice, rights retention means a predictive procedure in which the researcher’s right to self-archive their peer-reviewed article manuscript is confirmed even before they sign a publishing contract, using their organisation’s (university’s) RRS policy. The organisation’s policy allows the AAM version of the author’s article to be accessed at the moment of publication in the university’s publication archive with the Creative Commons licence. The goal of this model is to reduce uncertainty and ensure the availability of research in trusted infrastructure even in the long term – in other words, support, academic freedom, and security of supply for research data.
RRS improves the long-term availability and independence of research in a situation where availability of research data is under an increased number of risks. Access to a publication may be interrupted by factors outside an individual researcher’s influence: changes in publishing models, platform dependence, political interference, administrative decisions, or technical or cyber security-related issues.
Here, parallel publishing serves as security of supply. It ensures the continuing availability of research data in trusted, non-commercial infrastructure regardless of what may happen to individual publishing platforms. RRS makes this backup process systematic and predictable.
The questions were answered by Tampere University Library Chief Specialist Susanna Nykyri.
