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. |
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Authors have moral rights, rights of use and related rights, which are described in this law. |
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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: |
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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. |
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There is a series of strategies to help you make ethical use of the information: |
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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. |
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To ensure compliance with intellectual property laws, the international WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), which belongs to the UN, was set up. |
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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. |
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Not all works are subject to copyright. This is the case of: |
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a) Works in the public domain, i.e., works not subject to copyright because: |
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a.1.) They are common knowledge, e.g. a definition of a term, a saying, a fact that everyone knows, etc. |
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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. |
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b.) Legal exceptions: |
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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. |
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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. |
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b.3.) The ideas inherent to the work: the way in which they are expressed is protected, but not the idea itself. |
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b.4.) Other uses allowed by court order. |
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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. |
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To achieve this, we recommend two strategies: |
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c.1.) Publishing in open access journals, e.g. those available at RACO (Catalan Open Access Journals) or DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals). |
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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. |
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A list of open access document repositories is available at OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) and ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories). |
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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: |
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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: |
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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. |
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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. |
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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: |
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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. |
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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. |
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