8.7 Publishing your work
If you’d like to publish your project and share it with people and communities you have done research with or about, you must pay close attention to copyright and access considerations right from the planning stage. If you don’t want to publish your work anywhere on the open web, you can use additional material for private study or research under the fair dealing rule in Australian copyright law. Copyright and access considerations may help you determine the format that is right for you and your audience.
If you find copyright, Creative Commons and access restrictions too limiting or confusing for your topic, think about how the format you choose might enable you to tell histories without reproducing images, audio or film or otherwise breaching copyright, cultural sensitivity or privacy. Think about the format that might be most accessible to and appropriate for the communities connected to your research. For example:
- Wikipedia articles use existing online sources to construct biographies and topic entries without requiring archival access.
- Podcasts let you describe visual sources rather than reproduce them and will also let you protect privacy and minimise risk of collections used in your research being decontextualised.
- Museum displays and illustrated essays might enable you to tell a story based on a selection of objects that you are permitted to share under copyright and Creative Commons provisions.
Licensing
Another publishing consideration you need to make is to decide on the Creative Commons licence you want to use. This involves considering what you are prepared to have done to your project. Are you okay with someone adding or translating content? Is changing the format acceptable to you? Allowing these would make your work more open and inclusive in some ways, as they allow it to be translated in multiple languages, shared in different formats to increase accessibility and be otherwise expanded. It does open up more risks, including decontextualising the histories you are telling. Take care with elements that have copyright attached. Check whether they can be included and published openly.
Interactive licensing tool
Use the University of Newcastle Licensing choices tool to help you decide on the Creative Commons licence that works best for your project.
The Licensing choices tool contains elements of the CC License Chooser (beta) by The University of Newcastle, licensed under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), and elements of the CC licensing flowchart by Creative Commons Australia, licensed under Attribution 2.5 Generic (CC BY 2.5).
Some collections may specify the kind of licence you can use if you want to use those collections without asking permission. For example, see the advice from the British Museum on Copyright and permissions. Each institution is different, so check each source carefully.
If you need help deciding on a Creative Commons licence for your research project, these blog posts are by people who changed their Creative Commons licences to more open licences:
