Copyright Guide for Faculty: Author/Students Rights

For more information about your rights, visit the pages shown below, hosted by Kwantlen Polytechnic University Library

While employed or enrolled at JIBC, students, staff, and faculty must follow copying guidelines as described in this guide. This includes ensuring proper use of fair dealing, educational exceptions, and any public domain or creative commons materials.

Outside of JIBC, students, faculty, and staff retain their individual rights. These include:

• The ability to copy for private (personal) use without requesting permission or paying royalties;
• The ability to copy any public domain works; AND
• The ability to copy any creative commons works within the limits set by the associated CC-BY license.

Outside of JIBC, students, staff, and faculty retain any rights associated with the creation of a work. These are referred to as your author rights. They include:

• Automatic copyright protection for your personal work;
• Automatic moral rights protection for your personal work; AND
• The ability to waive or retain any associated rights.

Publishing Your Work

Many publishing agreements transfer copyright from author to publisher. If you intend to make your work open access or deposit it in a repository (such as JIBC's The Vault) then make sure you retain the right to archive your work (or retain copyright altogether).

Many publishing contracts can be complex and publishers may insist that they need exclusive copyright in order to publish your work. Before signing a publishing agreement, ask yourself whether you will be able retain any author rights, make copies of your work, archive your work, or distribute your work to colleagues or students, and whether those factors are important to you.

You can check Open Policy Finder (formerly Sherpa/Romeo) for journal and publisher policies.

For more guidance on publishing your work, check the Faculty Services Guide.

Employees (Staff and Faculty)

Members of the JIBC Community are encouraged to discuss matters of IP ownership, use, and control with the appropriate Dean or designate prior to embarking on any JIBC-related assignment, project or undertaking that would result in the creation of IP. 

This is a non-exhaustive list of scenarios in which JIBC employees (staff and faculty) retain the rights to works they create while employed at JIBC. For more information see the JIBC Intellectual Property Policy (3107).

JIBC employees (staff and faculty) own work they create during their employment at JIBC that is:

• Course materials created by faculty in support of their own teaching activities*
• Scholarly works
• Work created from research funding awarded to the individual researcher (not to JIBC)
• Research results, inventions, or other materials created without significant use of JIBC resources

*Employees are encouraged to assign ownership of course materials to JIBC in order to support collegiality with other post-secondary institutions and allow instructors at other institutions to use their materials.

Students

JIBC students retain all rights to the assignments, projects, papers, and capstones they create as part of normal course requirements.

JIBC students who create materials as part of their employment at JIBC are treated as employees. See above.