ECGI Copyright and Open Access
Copyright in all ECGI working papers rests with the author(s). ECGI does not claim ownership of, or seek assignment of, any intellectual property in papers submitted to the series.
By submitting a paper, authors grant ECGI a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to host, display, index, distribute, and preserve the paper on ecgi.global and in designated mirror archives. This licence does not prevent authors from posting the same paper elsewhere — on SSRN, an institutional repository, or a personal website.
ECGI respects authors' moral rights throughout: we will always attribute the paper to its author(s) as submitted, and will not modify or adapt the paper without the author's consent.
Option A is the default — the same position under which the series has always operated.
Option | Licence | Description | Funder compliance | Commercial AI training |
|---|---|---|---|---|
A Default | All rights reserved | Distributed for discussion and non-commercial educational purposes only. Not to be reproduced, transmitted, or adapted without the author's written permission. | Suitable for authors with no funder Open Access requirement. | Not permitted. ECGI automatically adds a machine-readable TDM reservation to this paper's record. |
Authors whose funding carries an open access mandate can select on the submission form the Creative Commons licence option that satisfies their funder's requirements.
Creative Commons licence options are also available if needed:
Option | Licence | Description | Funder compliance | Commercial AI training |
|---|---|---|---|---|
B | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 | Free to share with attribution for non-commercial purposes; no derivatives or adaptations permitted. | Satisfies DFG (Germany) and similar mandates allowing non-commercial and no-derivatives restrictions. Does not satisfy ERC, Horizon Europe, or UKRI. | Not permitted. The non-commercial restriction explicitly prohibits use by commercial AI systems. TDM reservation applied. |
C | CC BY-NC 4.0 | Free to share and adapt with attribution for non-commercial purposes; derivative works permitted. | Satisfies NWO (Netherlands) and similar mandates that accept non-commercial restrictions. Does not satisfy ERC, Horizon Europe, or UKRI. | Not permitted. The non-commercial restriction explicitly prohibits use by commercial AI systems. TDM reservation applied. |
D Most open | CC BY 4.0 | Free to share, adapt, and build upon for any purpose — including commercial — with attribution. | Satisfies all major European and US funder mandates, including ERC, Horizon Europe, UKRI, FWF, and NWO. | Permitted. There are no restrictions on commercial use under CC BY. No TDM reservation applied. |
ECGI will not sell, licence, or commercially exploit individual papers. Aggregate and anonymised data about the series may be used for ECGI's own research and reporting.
ECGI's licence selection applies only to the copy hosted on ecgi.global. It does not govern, and is not affected by, any licence applied to the same paper on another platform (SSRN, an institutional repository, or elsewhere). Authors retain copyright and may grant different — including more or less restrictive — terms to different platforms simultaneously.
Authors should be aware that Creative Commons licences are irrevocable: once applied to a copy of a paper — whether by the author directly or by a platform's default settings — that licence cannot be withdrawn from people who have already accessed the paper under those terms. If, for example, a platform applies a CC licence to a paper as a default (whether or not the author actively selected it), that licence remains valid on that copy regardless of what licence is selected on ecgi.global. Authors who wish to avoid having a CC licence applied to their paper elsewhere should review and configure the licence settings on any other platform where their paper appears.
Under the EU Digital Single Market Directive (Article 4), rights-holders may reserve their works from commercial text and data mining — including AI training — by means of a machine-readable TDM reservation. ECGI applies this reservation automatically based on the paper's licence: all papers under Options A, B, and C carry a TDM reservation; papers under Option D (CC BY) do not, because the CC BY licence already permits commercial use. Authors do not need to request this — it follows from their licence choice.
Note: A TDM reservation signals to automated systems that the content may not be used for text and data mining — including AI model training — but it is a statement of rights, not a technical barrier; compliant crawlers will respect it, but non-compliant ones will not.
ECGI working papers may remain hosted on ecgi.global after the paper has been accepted or published in a journal. This is consistent with the self-archiving policies of all major corporate governance, finance, and law publishers; working papers (submitted versions) are the least-restricted category across the industry.
Authors are responsible for ensuring that keeping the working paper posted complies with any copyright agreement signed with a journal publisher. By submitting to the ECGI Working Paper Series, authors confirm that posting the paper complies with existing and anticipated publisher agreements. In the rare case that a publisher requires removal of the working paper after journal acceptance, authors should notify ECGI.
When a working paper is subsequently published in a journal, ECGI encourages authors to notify us so that a "Published as" note can be added to the working paper record. This helps readers find the final version and helps search engines correctly relate the two versions of the work.
The metadata associated with each working paper — title, author name(s), abstract, keywords, publication date, and DOI — is made available freely and openly, regardless of the paper-level licence. Metadata may be harvested and used by academic aggregators, search engines, institutional repositories, and other services without restriction.
Paper metadata is distributed under CC0 1.0 Universal (Public Domain Dedication), consistent with Crossref standards and library best practice.
Questions about this policy, requests for permissions beyond those granted here, takedown requests, or notifications of journal publication should be addressed to:
European Corporate Governance Institute
c/o the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium
Rue Ducale 1, B-1000 Brussels, Belgium