5 Copyright
As you acknowledged in the Terms of Service you accepted in creating a Pressbooks account, you should make sure that any content that you upload and publish with Pressbooks is used lawfully and with appropriate permissions. This means that the content should meet one of the following criteria:
- Content is owned by you
- Content is owned by a third-party but used with permission or a license to reuse
- Content is in the public domain
- Content is reused in accordance with the Doctrine of Fair Use
If you have questions about copyright in publishing, we have a guide for that.
If you are searching for openly-licensed materials that you can incorporate into your book—particularly for a book you’re creating for classroom use—we suggest consulting the following resources:
Note that as a member of the JMU community, when you create your own book, you will typically hold copyright as an author of your work under JMU Policy 1107. The only real exception to this rule arises in instances where the university has invested significant sums of money, typically >$10,000, in the specific creation of the work. Please check JMU Policy 1107 or contact Howard S. Carrier, carriehs@jmu.edu, for further information. If you do hold copyright, you can choose how you want to allow others to use your publication. We talk about this more in the Apply a License section.
