Skip to Main Content

Florida Online Journals (OJ): Copyright in OJS

Scholarly Journal Publishing: Florida Online Journals (Florida OJ) is a service for publishing journal content. The software allows for a variety of publishing workflows including prospective authors uploading material, anonymous reviews, and publishing

Copyright in OJS

The Open Journal Systems (OJS) software powering Florida OJ is designed around supporting publishing of journal articles from start to finish - prospective authors submit content, the content goes through editorial review and copyediting, and the finalized paper is published and made available online.  One of the key problems that RightsStatements.org solves is how to indicate copyright status when the author cannot be located, and hence when the author cannot assign a Creative Commons license.  Because direct submission by authors is a focus of the software, the software is oriented towards supporting Creative Commons licenses.

Florida OJ has a place to enter a license, and then that license can be applied to all existing content.  It will be displayed with the label of "license".  The built in licenses are Creative Commons 4.0 licenses.  RightsStatements.org statements are not licenses.  The entire standard was designed to indicate that material is believed to have a copyright status, but there are no promises.  Displaying the RightsStatements.org value with a label reading "license" is contradictory.

Meanwhile, Florida OJ also supports uncontrolled (ie. full paragraph) statements describing the copyright policy for a journal.  FLVC strongly encourages adding such a statement regardless of whether or not you will implement Creative Commons or RightsStatements.org .

How can I add a copyright statement to my journal?

How can I add a copyright statement to my journal?

1. Log into https://journals.flvc.org. Click on your journal.

2. Hover your mouse over your name and click on Dashboard.

3. In the left hand menu, click on "Workflow".

4. Under the "Submission" tab, Click on "Author Guidelines". Enter the notice in the "Copyright Notice". Save when you are finished.

5. Under the heading for Copyright Notice, describe your journal's copyright policy.

  • What's useful here is:
    • A short statement describing the copyright status of your journal's content.
    • Information about copyright agreements that authors must agree to.  For example, sample language, and any information about what copyright transfers to the journal versus what copyright is retained by the author.
    • Who someone would contact to get permission to reprint material.

Adding this statement will show up in the journal's "About" pages under "Submissions" and will allow someone looking through the site to find the information.  It will not be readable to a computer, so won't support faceted search.

FLVC strongly encourages adding a copyright statement to your journal.  Although it won't be used by search engines, it can be referenced in order to determine whether your content is appropriate for federated search projects such as the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons

RightsStatement.org

RightsStatement.org

Directory of Open Access Journals

DOAJ site Screen shot