Throughout its many years of publication, SCAN has enjoyed the support from its dedicated contributors. The service that they provide to this publication is on a voluntary basis. These contributors do not stand to gain any financial reward from their involvement in SCAN.
Before this, there was no clear copyright and licensing policy with regards to contents submitted for publication in SCAN. It was also unclear as to who owns the contents in this publication and should anyone wish to reuse the contents, from whom should they ask for permission?
We believe in freedom and openness. And that is why we have decided from September 2010, all contents available on this website will be licensed under a Creative Commons license.
What’s in the license?
The license essentially allows anyone to reuse the contents — including, but not limited to, texts, photos, videos and audios — provided that a proper attribution is made to the author of the content and to SCAN. The contents can also be adapted or be used in a derivative work as long as such work is licensed under the same Creative Commons license. More details are available in the license documentation.
With this in effect, the copyright of all contents on this website are jointly owned by the author and by SCAN. Should there be a request for these licensing requirements to be waived or for an alternative form of licensing, the current SCAN Editorial Committee and the author shall agree whether or not to approve the request.
Most of the standard copyright and intellectual property principles apply. However, instead of ‘all rights reserved’, Creative Commons-licensed contents have ‘some rights reserved’. Using these contents does not change the copyright ownership and the owner’s rights. It is simply a blanket permission for other people to reuse the contents in an acceptable way.
What are the benefits for contributors?
People who use works licensed under Creative Commons are arguably very responsible. They respect other people’s intellectual property by giving attribution to the author of any original work that they use. Major search engines like Google and Yahoo! provide Creative Commons web searches which enables other people to specifically find such contents. Contributors, especially those who submit multimedia contents — such as photos, videos and audios — will gain more exposure for their work.
What if I do not want to participate?
If any of your previous works appears on this website and you do not want it to be licensed under Creative Commons and to be jointly owned with SCAN, please email [email]scan.website@lusu.co.uk[/email] before 1 September 2010. We will remove your work completely from the website.
All content submissions from 1 September 2010 will be automatically licensed under this Creative Commons license. However, the Editorial Committee may make an exemption in exceptional circumstances on a case-by-case basis.
Which contents do not apply?
The Creative Commons license apply to all contents on this website except the followings:
- Contents in the Letters to Editor section;
- Contents attributed to any third party ie not submitted by a contributor;
- Contents marked in any of the following ways: Copyright, (C), or ©;
- Logos, trademarks and identity materials; and
- Advertisements and other promotional and publicity materials.
We may update this policy from time to time. Please check the policy page for more details.
