Copyright and Access Guide

Any material deposited in Demetrius is the fruit of intellectual endeavour by one or more persons working on campus (or associated with the ANU in some other way).

Clearly, this material is valuable intellectual property.

So who owns it?

The copyright of any material deposited in Demetrius is retained by the depositor. It's your work and it remains your work: the repository exists to preserve and make available that material, but it does not assume ownership rights.

The depositor doesn't have to hold copyright: they may also be acting on behalf of a third party who is the actual copyright holder. That said, there are two important copyright-related matters to consider, community ownership and repository business.

Community Ownership

As outlined elsewhere, we don't deal with depositors individually.

The Community is the representative of, and speaks for, relevant depositors and Collections. Therefore, while individual depositors might retain copyright or represent external copyright holders, communications regarding Collections will always be with relevant Communities. There are three reasons for this:

• There are too many depositors for it to be possible for us to work with them individually
• A Collection may contain the work of many depositors/creators, or a single person might have material in many different Collections
• The material stored in the repository is for posterity: we aim to make your research findings and your primary data available to researchers in 25 or 50 years' time; so we need to work with organisations because they outlive individuals

Repository Business

We need copyright clearance to do our basic work: copying files for backup; transforming files into new formats when older formats become obsolete. Further, we need clearance to provide access to original or derivative versions of deposited material.

We have developed a sample Demetrius copyright license agreement that can be used by the ANU community.

Access Guide

Any material deposited in the Demetrius will always consist of:

• A file, or groups of files, that should be in an appropriate archival format (we can provide advice on archival formats).
• Metadata information about the files; for example, creator, title, description, keywords and so on.

We can help here, but of course we can't know the significance of the material you're depositing. By default, we ask for clearance from you so that the original file is available for download by the general public. Demetrius is an 'open access' repository, after all. However, we recognise that not all material should be made available widely: there may be confidentiality or cultural sensitivity reasons. This is a decision that you (and your Community) must make.

If you decide that certain material shouldn't be accessed, then we will lock it off to anonymous (public) use. We do this on a Collection-by-Collection basis: if you have a mix of open and closed materials, then the simplest solution is to have two Collections.

Regardless of whether deposited Item is accessible, its associated metadata always is. It is not possible to have 'hidden' deposits or Collections: the material might be locked from public access, but information about it, and the fact that it is stored in the repository, is always available.

Note that related policies are under currently development