Except where otherwise noted, this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The information obtained from or through this website is provided as guidelines for using works for educational purposes and is not intended to constitute legal advice.
Camosun College values creation and innovation and encourages individuals to create innovative works and inventions and related entrepreneurial activities by members of the College community, including students.
College faculty owns the copyright or patent in all works that may be copyrighted or patented that have been prepared or created as part of their assigned duties unless
a) the College Faculty is hired or agrees to create and produce a copyrightable or patentable work product for the College; or
b) the College Faculty is given release time from their usual duties to create and produce a copyrightable or patentable work product; or
c) the College Faculty is paid, in addition to their regular rate of pay, to produce a copyrightable or patentable work product.
The College owns the intellectual property in all works created by College Employees unless otherwise provided for at law or by a written agreement approved by the College.
Student owns intellectual property in works developed as part of their normal course requirements, subject to any employment or other obligations between the student and the College, or any external parties that sponsor or support the student in the development of the intellectual property. The College shall have a right to use works developed by students in perpetuity for institutional, commercially non-competitive purposes and may retain prototypes or other original work developed by students using College resources.
For more information, please check Camosun College Commercialization of Intellectual Property.
In Canada, original works (Artistic, Literary, Musical or Dramatic form) are automatically copyrighted and protected when they are created in a fixed format, such as on paper, in sheet music, or files stored on a computer drive.
A work must meet 3 conditions in order to be protected by copyright:
As soon as your original work is fixed in a material format (Print, Digital or Photographs), it will be automatically protected by copyright until it goes into Public Domain.
As a creator of copyrighted material, there is technically nothing to do for you. It doesn't matter if you put the copyright symbol (©) or not. It may help other people recognize your works as copyrighted materials. The copyright symbol is not mandatory.
In Canada, generally speaking, copyright lasts for the life of the creator + 50 years. Your works will enter the public domain when their copyright expires.
There is no international copyright law, but most of countries in the world signed various international copyright treaties or trade treaties. As soon as your original works are protected by Canadian copyright law, they will be protected by each countries' copyright law standard on their territories. For example, your work will be protected by Canadian copyright law in Canada, but it will be protected by Japanese Copyright law in Japan.
For you protection, make sure to save, print, or photocopy your original idea. Again, once you place your original works in a fixed format, copyright will be automatically exercised domestically and internationally. Okay, then how can you protect your works?
Are you considering to share your works with other people? please check Alternatives to Copyright.
You must be actively protect yourself. Polices or Canadian government are not monitoring on and offline 24/7 to protect their citizens copyright. It is your responsibility to protect your works. Here are some method to protect copyrighted works.
Would you like to share your work, or do you want more people use your work? There are many alternative choices you can use which give you and the users more flexibility and less restrictions than copyrighted materials. Most popular alternatives are:
Creative Commons (CC) is a nonprofit organization that helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world’s pressing challenges.
CC provides Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools that give every person and organization in the world a free, simple, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works; ensure proper attribution; and allow others to copy, distribute, and make use of those works.
| Image | Condition | Description |
 |
BY (Attribution) |
Credit must be given to the creator |
 |
SA (Share Alike) |
Adaptations must be shared under the same terms |
 |
NC (Non Commercial) |
Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted |
 |
ND (No Derivatives) |
No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted |
Some content in this guide has been copied and adapted from Creativecommons.org licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0)
From: How To Attribute Creative Commons Photos by Foter, licensed under CC BY SA 3.0
If you are still not sure which license you should choose, please try Creative Commons License Chooser.
It is a tool developed by Creative Commons to help people to find right license for them.
Published research findings are meant to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, encourage innovation, enrich education, and stimulate the economy – to improve the public good. Yet, too often, research results are not available to the broadest community of potential users. This has resulted in a call for a new framework to allow research results to be more easily accessed and used—a call for Open Access.
Open Access (OA) refers to scholarly literature that is freely available on the Internet.
These resources are sustained by the academic and scientific communities that produce them. They are typically found in peer-reviewed Open Access Journals and Institutional Repositories, which act as archives of institutions' scholarly output.
The library maintains a guide that outlines sources for open education resources, open access journals and books, and sources of open culture (images, video etc.). Open Resources Guide
Researchers
Educational Institutions
Businesses
Public
* Content on this page has been copied and adapted from Why Open Access? (SPARC)
Find a suitable OA journal. Go to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and browse by field.
Some content in this guide has been copied and adopted from the HOAP wiki from Harvard University licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC-BY 3.0)