For more information on Lewis University's Institutional Repository and its associated policies, please read through the dedicated LibGuide. This current page is meant to expand more upon how copyright, Creative Commons, and the Institutional Repository interact and work in tandem with the dedicated LibGuide.
The Lewis University Institutional Repository follows the industry best practice of serving as an Open Access repository. To this end, the Institutional Repository includes a built-in Creative Commons license chooser (how to choose your license is covered in the dedicated IR LibGuide).
While choosing a Creative Commons license is not required, it is highly encouraged. As an Open Access repository, Creative Commons licenses allow the Institutional Repository to serve as a hub for the work that faculty and students are producing while at Lewis. Creative Commons licenses ensure that work can be built upon, reworked, and reshared in the interest of advancing scientific and artistic knowledge. But the works remain protected; because the works will always require attribution, any work made available on the Institutional Repository will be protected.
Although submitters may opt-out of licensing their work with a Creative Commons license in favor of an "all rights reserved" approach, our Institutional Repository requests BY-NC-ND as a default, which is the most restrictive Creative Commons license possible. This license will protect most rights of the creator, but it will allow the work to be reused and to be read in the pursuit of further research. However, we strongly encourage creators to choose a less restrictive license.
If you choose to opt-out and select traditional copyright, the work will still be available to read and download in the repository through our non-exclusive license but it will be more restrictive for other researchers to use in their pursuits. To continue the mission of other institutional repositories and to facilitate our Lasallian mission, we discourage creators going towards traditional copyright. An open access repository allows our community to enter into a wide dialogue with scholars from hundreds of different institutions and bring our unique viewpoint and exemplary work out into the world. Creative Commons licenses facilitate these goals by allowing more lenient reuse, remixing, deriving, and resharing permissions and getting the works in front of more people.