Copyright, Licensing and IP

Copyright is a form of intellectual property which protects the use of some materials, including works of scholarship. In Australia it is regulated by the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth).

Are you the copyright owner?

In general, co-authors of journal articles are jointly the copyright owners of their work. If one of the authors is a staff member at a University, they should check whether the work is owned by themself or their employer.

University of Sydney Staff should check the Intellectual Property Policy 2016, the Library's support page (UniKey login required), or submit an enquiry with [email protected].

Licencing rights to APESA for publication

As a copyright owner, you are granted a number of exclusive rights to the reproduction, publishing, communication, performance, translation or broadcast of your work. You also have moral rights, which refer to your rights to have authorship attributed properly and not misleadingly.

Co-authors and other copyright owners of works submitted for publication are not required to relinquesh their copyright ownership to APESA. Instead, we will ask you to license some of your rights to us.

We use the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public Licence.

APESA must recieve permission from all copyright owners of a work to publish it. It is the responsibility of the person submitting the work that this is met, including copyright of images or art which is included in their submission. The Managing Editors can assist with this if you are unsure.

For non-authors

Contributors, editors and copywriters for the journal will be asked to sign a deed which grants copyright and other intellectual property rights to APESA, so you will not own work which you produce for the journal. Artists will be asked to sign an agreement for the commission or use of their work but retain their ownership.

Reviewers typically are the copyright owners of their reviews, however these are not published, reproduced or broadcasted by APESA or the Editors. Reviews are not presented directly to submitters, rather the Editors take the suggestions of reviewers and relay them to authors as appropriate. As ideas are not subject to copyright (only the expression or organisation of those ideas), reviewers are generally not required to license any rights to us.