Open Journal Systems (OJS) at CSUDH

There are a variety of relationships involved in managing an open access ejournal. This page has information about some of the agreements, licensing, and rights issues as well as some resources and tips for finding and managing images.

• The University Library will draw up a memo of understanding to be signed by representatives of the Libraries and of the journal. This memo details expectations the Libraries have of the journal and what services the journal can expect from the Libraries.
   
• Journals published by the University Library must be open access. 
   
• The University Library applies a Creative Commons license (determined in consultation with the journal editor ) to works in journals published through the University Library OJS service. This license specifies the rights that readers have to journal content.
   
• Authors retain copyright over their work. They license their work so it can appear in the journal. Journals who require authors to submit articles through OJS can use a click-through process in which the author agrees to the licensing as part of the submission process. Journals who use a different submission process must provide authors with a copy of an author license agreement to be signed and returned. These signed agreements must be kept by the journal.

Authors sometimes use images to illustrate their articles and journals may use images on their covers. If you don't create your own, finding images to use can seem a daunting task.

Public Domain and Other Freely Available Images

The Finding Images research guide includes resources for public domain and Creative Commons images. One source that we recommend is Wikimedia Commons. Aside from having almost 38 million freely available media files to choose from, they also provide attribution information that you can cut and paste into your document.

When Using Third-Party Copyrighted Images

• Be aware that if you do choose to use third-party images, you should do a thorough rights evaluation: make sure you obtain and save any necessary permissions and that you provide the proper attribution in the journal.
• For student papers that may subsequently be submitted as articles to a student journal, remember, using an image in an online journal is not necessarily the same as using an image for educational purposes: be sure to re-evaluate the rights carefully.
• If you have both print and online versions of your journal, you need to negotiate rights for both formats.

If you have questions or need assistance on copyright issues, check the Copyright and Scholarship research guide or contact Carli Spina.