Skip to Main Content

USI Student Scholarship in SOAR (Scholarly Open Access Repository)

Information about submitting your scholarship in SOAR.

SOAR at USI License

The SOAR at USI Submission Agreement does not transfer any of your copyrights. Instead, you are simply giving the institution a license to make your work available for others to read and download. Users are still bound by copyright law with respect to further copying, distribution,, etc. 

You do have the option of expanding these user rights by applying a Creative Commons license. More information on these licenses follows. If you are unsure how you should license your dissertation or thesis in SOAR at USI, talk with your advisor. If you have questions on the specifics of copyright or Creative Commons licenses, contact the Scholarly Communication Unit, Peter Whiting, Scholarly Communication Librarian, pwhiting@usi.edu 

Creative Commons Licenses

Creative Commons has created six different Creative Commons Licenses that any author can use free of charge. Each license allows the author to either retain or waive specific intellectual property rights.

  • Creative Commons –   Introduction to Creative Commons on YouTube
  • Choose a License – Creative Commons wizard to help you build a license for your own work

Attribution: CC BY

  • This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

Attribution-ShareAlike: CC BY-SA

  • This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

Attribution-NoDerivs: CC BY-ND

  • This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Attribution-NonCommercial: CC BY-NC

  • This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don't have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA

  • This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs: CC BY-NC-ND

  • This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.