ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository

License Agreements

UofL requires UofL faculty and students who deposit scholarship into the UofL scholarly repository, ThinkIR, to grant UofL a nonexclusive license permitting UofL to make their scholarship available worldwide. Creating a licensing relationship with UofL accomplishes three related but distinct goals:

• First, requiring faculty and students to grant a nonexclusive copyright license and agree to other terms and conditions encourages them to think more directly about copyright, licensing, and, more specifically, publication agreements and introduces them to investigating how these legal arrangements will influence and control the ownership of their scholarship and subsequent uses of it through time in all of their publishing activities.
• Second, this structure enables faculty and students to gain a more nuanced understanding of how they could think about their scholarship and take affirmative steps to identify and protects their interests in making their scholarship available under a framework consistent with their expectations and goals.
• Third, a licensing relationship gives UofL legal assurances that depositing faculty and students have investigated the copyright issues arising in their scholarship, including the use of 3rd party copyrighted works in their scholarship, and have taken those steps necessary to grant UofL a nonexclusive license in order to bring their scholarship to a worldwide audience of scholars through open access to ThinkIR.

UofL makes these licenses available here to give faculty and students an opportunity to review them prior to self-deposit, or mediated deposit if applicable for faculty, in ThinkIR and to frame UofL expectations and requirements for making their scholarship widely available. They also provide an opportunity for faculty and students who have not yet developed a specific scholarly work for deposit to understand those expectations and requirements in order to make the actual deposit of the scholarly work flow smoothly.

Consequently, the licenses posted here are solely for review purposes. All deposits of scholarship from faculty, whether self or mediated deposit, and student self-deposit will require that the depositor agree to this licensing relationship either through clicking “I agree” electronically in some instances or signing a print license that you may receive from your school, department, unit, or the Open Access and Repository Coordinator in University Libraries. Given the unique and differing nature of faculty and student scholarship, UofL has crafted the three separate licenses below to accommodate their unique needs and differences. Please make sure to review the one designed for the deposit of your scholarly work depending on whether you are a faculty member or student.