6.5 Publish your work
If you would 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 from the planning stage. If you do not want to publish your work, 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 are finding copyright, Creative Commons and access restrictions too limiting and/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. If you can, ask those communities what format they would like rather than assume you know what is best. If you cannot ask them directly, you can do some research to see if you can find examples of history projects led by those communities.
For example:
- Wikipedia articles use existing online sources to construct biographies and topic entries without requiring archival access.
- Podcasts enable you to describe visual sources rather than reproduce them and will also enable you to protect privacy, avoid deadnaming or misgendering people, 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.
Another publishing consideration you need to make is to decide on the Creative Commons licence you want to use.
Activity: Interactive licensing tool
Use the following Licensing choices tool to help you decide on the Creative Commons license that works best for your project:
This Licensing choices tool contains elements of the CC License Chooser (beta) by The University of Newcastle is 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).
Note that some collections may specify the kind of license you can use if you want to use those collections without asking permission. For example, see Copyright and permissions | British Museum.
Read the following blog posts from people who changed their Creative Commons licenses to more open ones if you need help deciding on a Creative Commons license that may work for your research project:
