How to make ethical use of the information

The information we have available to us can be used in many different ways, but only some respect the copyright. This is protected by the Intellectual Property Law (1/1996, of 12 April 1996). This law governs the rights of the author regarding artistic, scientific and literary works in any format; it is what is known as copyright.

Authors have moral rights, rights of use and related rights, which are described in this law.

Making ethical use of the information means complying with current legislation and guaranteeing authors their moral rights to the work, i.e., recognising who the author of the text or an idea is; the rights of use and related rights. Rights of use are:

  • Right of reproduction: making copies of the work.

  • Right of distribution: selling or lending the work.

  • Right of public communication: making the work known.

  • Right of transformation: making changes to the original work.

As indicated in Point 1, the document needs to be cited correctly, help with which is provided by the SGRB (Bibliographical References Management Systems) which were introduced in Point 2.

There is a series of strategies to help you make ethical use of the information:

  • Paraphrasing, i.e., writing the text using your own words which are then included in the text. You must always state correctly from where the information was taken. You must also always be aware not to misrepresent the author's ideas.

  • If it is necessary to copy an excerpt, this should always be in quotation marks and giving a final reference or footnote stating from where the excerpt was taken.

  • Always cite the source both in the text and in the bibliography at the end of the completed document.

  • When reading a document, take notes always giving the source.

If you use excerpts from a text-format document or an audiovisual or graphic document (images, videos, etc.) by someone else without quoting the source, you are committing plagiarism and this carries both an academic and legal penalty, in accordance with the Intellectual Property Law.

To ensure compliance with intellectual property laws, the international WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), which belongs to the UN, was set up.

The presence of organisations that collectively manage intellectual property rights should also be highlighted. In Spain, the following should be mentioned SGAE (General Society of Authors and Publishers) and CEDRO (Spanish Centre for Reprographic Rights) for periodical books and publications; to name but a few organisations.

Not all works are subject to copyright. This is the case of:

a) Works in the public domain, i.e., works not subject to copyright because:

a.1.) They are common knowledge, e.g. a definition of a term, a saying, a fact that everyone knows, etc.

a.2.) Copyright has elapsed in accordance with the terms established by law, e.g. if 70 years have passed since the author's death (in the case of written works). Some of these works can be found digitised on the internet, such as the Gutenberg Project

b.) Legal exceptions:

b.1.) The use of a non-substantial part of the work. Normally an article from a journal and in the case of books, up to 10% of their content.

b.2.) If used for private study, non-commercial research, to write reviews, to inform about current events, in some educational contexts, to make the work of librarians or archivists easier, etc.

b.3.) The ideas inherent to the work: the way in which they are expressed is protected, but not the idea itself.

b.4.) Other uses allowed by court order.

c.) Open Access Works. According to the Manifest of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, Open Access is understood to be free access for the exchange of works that allow users to read, print, copy, distribute and extract information to be used for any legal purpose, without financial, legal or technical barriers other than the inevitable barriers generated by access itself to the internet.

To achieve this, we recommend two strategies:

c.1.) Publishing in open access journals, e.g. those available at RACO (Catalan Open Access Journals) or DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals).

c.2.) Publishing in a traditional journal which allows authors to place articles in document repositories, be they institutional, such as the UOC Deposit, or themed repositories.

A list of open access document repositories is available at OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) and ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories).

Authors leave an electronic copy of the article, paper, report, etc. in these repositories known as an e-print. There are two types of e-prints:

  • pre-prints if they have not yet completed the revision process conducted by experts in the subject area of an academic journal,

  • post-prints if they have already been published.

When authors publish an article, they assign their copyright to the publisher. To find out what rights authors have regarding their work once it has been published, you should consult the publisher or resources such as Sherpa/Romeo for international publishers, and Dulcinea for Spanish publishers. According to these sources, there are four possible ways of depositing documents:

  • Green: the publisher allows authors to deposit pre-prints and post-prints as open.

  • Blue: the publisher allows authors to deposit post-prints as open.

  • Yellow: the publisher allows authors to deposit pre-prints in open.

  • White: no deposits are allowed.

All these documents (or works in general) are protected by adaptations of the copyright or copyleft licences. Copyleft is a type of licence usually applied to software creations basically so that everyone can execute a software program, copy it, modify it and distribute it freely. It is promoted by Richard Stallman's GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. To ensure these rights to use the programs, the LGNU General Public Licence (GPL) was created as was the GNU Free Documentation Licence (FDL) for related documentation.

In this vein, Creative Commons licences appeared. The licences ensure copyright protection. There are six types of Creative Commons Licences, all of which have been adapted to the law of the country.

Creative Commons Logo

  • Recognition (by): allows you to copy, distribute, communicate the work publicly and create works derived from it, providing that there is recognition for the author.

  • Shared recognition (by-sa): allows you to copy, distribute, transmit the work and adapt it, providing that there is recognition for the author and if a derived work is created it must be distributed with the same licence as the original work.

  • Recognition without derivatives (by-nd): allows you to copy, distribute and transmit the work, providing that there is recognition for the author and the work is not altered, transformed and no derived works are created.

  • Non-commercial recognition (by-nc): allows you to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work, providing that there is recognition for the author and it is not used for commercial purposes.

  • Non-commercial and shared recognition (by-nc-sa): allows you to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work, providing that there is recognition for the author, it is not used for commercial purposes and if a derived work is created that it is distributed with a licence similar to that of the original work.

  • Non-commercial recognition without derivates (by-nc-nd): allows you to copy, distribute and transmit the work, providing that there is recognition for the author, it is used for non-commercial purposes and it is not altered or transformed and no derived works are created.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1BDVHi8L6E

If you are a member of the UOC community and would like to deposit your work with the UOC's institutional repository, we recommend that you consult the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FSMgAMybhc

To sum up, as information users you must be aware that every document has an author and that they must be afforded recognition and their rights respected. The best way to do this is always to cite them. To do this efficiently, there are programs you can use which manage bibliographical references, such as Refworks.

As authors of texts (books, articles, etc.), we have a number of rights and we need to know what these are, to whom we should assign them and under what conditions.

 © Fundació per a la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya