The Copyright and Information Policy (CIP) staff work with the Duke community to provide expertise, consultation, and instruction on copyright, authors’ rights, fair use in research and teaching, open access and open education, and the scholarly publishing system.
Contact CIP for:
CIP offers consultations on copyright and fair use as it applies in your research, teaching, and publishing, including evaluating copyright status of third-party materials for use in publications and courses, crafting permissions strategies, and navigating open licenses.
Guidance on how to negotiate your publication contracts, and clauses to look out for as you’re reviewing their terms.
Embedded in a complex, evolving scholarly publishing ecosystem, we situate present practices in the history of publishing, confront inequities of access to and citation of knowledge, and guide Duke researchers and students to share their work in journals, books, and online. We can help you select a venue to publish to reach a wide audience and measure the impact and use of your work by others — in your field and beyond.
Key topics: journal choice, open access to books and journals, citation bias and citational justice, research metrics and impact
The Duke Libraries believe in making access to knowledge more equitable by strategically supporting open access to scholarship and open infrastructure. The Policy on Open Access to Research, approved by the faculty in 2010, enables Duke researchers to share their research openly without fees in the DukeSpace repository. The Libraries invest in open access initiatives in journals, books, and digital publishing; defraying publication fees; and transformative publishing platforms such as arXiv and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
See the Duke Libraries’ guide to open access and open scholarship and contact open-access@duke.edu to learn more.
Looking to make your course more affordable for students and more flexible for you? OER include textbooks, workbooks, syllabi and lesson plans, videos, assignments, and even whole courses licensed and shared openly for others to modify and reuse in their own teaching.
We can help you find OER you can adapt for your classroom or to create materials to engage your students and share with peer instructors. See the Duke Libraries’ guide to OER.
We teach workshops and class sessions on copyright, information policy, and publishing topics. See our upcoming events or contact library-cip@duke.edu to collaborate with us.
Past workshops:
- Negotiating Author Agreements
- Purposeful Publication: Navigating the Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem to Achieve Your Research Goals
- Measuring Research Reach and Impact for Graduate Students
- Open Access to Knowledge: Navigating the Landscape
- Citational Justice and Bias in Scholarly Publishing
- Copyright and Fair Use for Digital Projects
- Legal and Ethical Issues in Artificial Intelligence
- Researching Copyright and Securing Permissions for Images in Academic Work
About us
Kate Dickson
Kate is the Copyright and Information Policy Librarian at Duke University LIbraries. Prior to this role, she was Copyright and Licensing Librarian and Associate Professor at UNC Charlotte. She previously worked as a copyright researcher at the Library of Congress, as a copyright and permissions intern at Duke Libraries, and as a reference intern and graduate assistant at UNC-CH Law Library and Duke Law Library. Prior to library school, she practiced law for 7 years in Washington, D.C. and Chapel Hill, NC. Kate holds an MSLS degree from UNC-SILS and a JD and MA in American Legal History from UVA. She is admitted to the North Carolina bar. Kate is available to answer questions and provide consultation and instruction about copyright, fair use, and authors' rights in research, teaching, and publication. She also works on library licenses, copyright assessment and contracts for library collections, and serves as the library's liaison to the Office of Counsel.
Haley Walton
Haley works with the Duke community to support the scholarly enterprise: effective literature searching and research practices; navigating scholarly publishing, including Libraries’ open access initiatives and the DukeSpace repository; and measuring the reach and impact of faculty and student research. She leads the Libraries’ programs in open education and OER, and is librarian for the Duke Program in Education, curating the collection on education topics and visiting undergraduate and graduate classrooms to share library resources, information, and research strategies.