Abstract

Authors of scientific works, like others who create original, literary or artistic works, possess a number of rights that are protected by national laws. There are two components to authors’ rights: Copyrights (which are intellectual property rights, i.e. economic rights) and moral rights. Copyright is essentially an exclusive right to make copies of an originally created literary, scientific or artistic work, and to make the work available to the public. The author’s moral rights are essentially a right to be attributed as the author of the work when it is copied and published and a right to preserve the integrity of the work, i.e. a right to object to alterations and use of the work that violates the author’s honour and reputation. These legal rights are sometimes used in the argument regarding breaches of research ethics norms for the use of material from other sources (plagiarism).