Scholars Junction: Access, Permissions, and Licensing

When you submit work to Scholars Junction, you will be asked to agree to our distribution license.

1. Right to Submit:
   You represent and warrant that:
   1. You are the author of the submitted work, the submission is your original work, and/or that you have the right to grant the rights contained in this license;
   2. Your submission does not, to the best of your knowledge, infringe upon anyone’s copyright;
   3. Your submission contains no libelous or other unlawful matter and makes no improper invasion of the privacy of any other person, and is classified as Category 1 according to MSU Data Classification and Individual Responsibilities section of the Information Security Program policies (https://www.infosecurity.msstate.edu/pdf/isp.pdf);
   4. If the submission contains material for which you do not hold copyright and that exceeds fair use, you have obtained the unrestricted permission of the copyright owner to grant MSU the rights required by this license, and that such third-party owned material is clearly identified and acknowledged within the text or content of the submission;
   5. If the submission is based upon work that has been sponsored or supported by an agency or organization other than MSU (such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, or private funder), you have fulfilled any right of review, confidentiality, or other obligations required by that contract or agreement.
2. Rights and Licensing:
   1. You grant to MSU the perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive rights (with right to sublicense) to:
      1. Reproduce your submission;
      2. Modify your submission to any medium or format (without changing its content) and keep more than one copy for the purposes of security, backup, and long-term preservation of the scholarly record;
      3. Distribute your submission (including the metadata and abstract) worldwide, in any format or medium, for non-commercial, research, educational, or related academic purposes only, and to allow users of SJ to do the same.
   2. You retain the copyright to your work and the right to submit your work to publishers or other repositories.
   3. MSU will clearly identify you as the author(s) or owner(s) of the submission (including both its metadata record and its associated downloadable files) and will not make any alteration, other than as allowed by this license, to the files in your submission, without your express permission. We may make changes to your submission’s metadata as needed to enhance discoverability and accuracy.

Along with the rights you grant to MSU, you need to define the rights you grant to Scholars Junction users. Scholars Junction is optimized to provide immediate full access to submitted work, but we can work with you to apply appropriate access restrictions when necessary.

General Licensing

When sharing your work, we encourage you to clarify your license terms to end users. You can choose to apply a Creative Commons license to your submission, but first be sure you understand (a) the meaning of the license and that (b) once you have released your work with a broad license, you cannot retroactively restrict that license on copies already in circulation. For that reason, unless you are sure you're comfortable having your name attached to any and all future uses or adaptations of your work, we suggest authors consider starting with the narrower CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International). You could always later widen the license to CC BY-NC or the broadest CC BY license.

Furthermore, it's a good idea to have that license information showing prominently on your submission (e.g. the title page) and echoed again in the "Rights Statement" section of the metadata.

Learn more about Creative Commons licenses:

Access Restrictions

Sometimes you need to restrict public access for a period of time. We can work with you to customize the level of access your work requires.

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