electronic theses and copyright janet aucock head of repository services march 2014

Electronic theses and copyright

Janet AucockHead of Repository services

March 2014

• Asserting your own copyright in your work and publication

• Observing the copyright of others and taking all reasonable steps to ensure that you have dealt with 3rd party copyright in your work

“this is a question of not infringing on the copyright of others, while at the same time protecting your own copyright”

Asserting your own copyright in your work and publication

• Your copyright. You own the copyright in your thesis. The Policy for Supervisors and Students in research postgraduate programmes Section 12.2.16.2 states “The copyright of a thesis normally belongs to its author”

• We recommend that you licence your thesis.• Deposit licence which is non exclusive and doesn’t compromise your reuse of your

thesis• User licence. Creative Commons. A way of self publishing but retaining your rights.

Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators which enable the legal sharing and reuse of cultural, educational, and scientific works.

• Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative works 3.0 Unported Licence

Attribution. You must give the original author credit.Non-Commercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.• Datestamping when electronic theses enter the Research@StAndrews:FullText • Cover sheets• Copyright statements in Research@StAndrews:FullText • Add your own copyright statement to your work and use the © symbol

Observing the copyright of others and taking all reasonable steps to ensure that you have dealt with 3rd party copyright in your work

• print copy of a thesis has historically been viewed as an examination script and it is normally accepted that 3rd party copyright material can be included in the print copy without seeking permissions

• electronic copy is deemed to be effectively published and therefore is not exempt in the same way

• electronic version will be made available online and you need to be aware of your responsibilities with regard to seeking 3rd party copyright permissions

• In both the thesis declaration which you sign and the deposit licence for the Repository you acknowledge that you have observed 3rd party copyright

• Even though the print copy is traditionally deemed exempt, which means that you can always present your complete thesis as the print version ie the examined version, we would still recommend that you follow good academic practice and seek permissions.


3rd party material• 3rd party material examples are illustrations, photographs, diagrams, maps, graphs,

extracts and quotations • journal articles that you have already published. You will usually need permission to

include the publisher’s version of your article because the publisher is usually the copyright holder of this version of your work.


How to seek permissions• take reasonable steps to contact the copyright holder to request permission to use

material• Use the standard letters which we provide on the copyright web pages• The copyright pages give specific information about the reuse of images• Review the material in your thesis as you go along and start the process to obtain

permissions at the earliest stage possible• Seek advice from supervisors and from experts in your schools, who will have had

experience in requesting copyright permissions• Contact the Copyright Officer and repository staff• If you are in any doubt whether you need to seek permissions then always seek

advice


Once you have received permissions• acknowledge and reference the material you use

eg Reproduced with permission of the rights holder• keep copies of letters and emails you receive from rights holders• if you do not need to clear copyright material or you get permissions for everything

that you need to clear you can submit the print copy and an identical electronic version on CD


Procedures if you cannot get permissions• Setbacks in getting permissions might be refusals from rights holders, requests for

costs which you can’t meet or rights holders who do not acknowledge your requests.• you are still entitled to use the material in your print version. So you can still make

use of all the material you need to present your thesis• In this situation you will need to have differences in the print version and the publicly

available electronic version

eg. the print version will have all the illustrations, the publicly available electronic version might have to exclude some.

eg the print version will have all the published articles you have chosen to include, but the publicly available electronic version may have to exclude these.

• plan in advance so that you can provide the relevant PDF files on CD when you are required to submit the electronic version of your thesis


Procedures if you cannot get permissions

You will need to submit: Print version (the original complete version)

Electronic version (a complete original version, identical to the print version, on CD, which we will archive into secure storage as a backup copy)

Publicly available electronic version (an edited version with all uncleared material removed, deposited on CD and which will be loaded into Research@StAndrews:FullText )

An accompanying document describing the omissions in the publicly available electronic version would be very helpful for Research@StAndrews:FullText staff when they process your deposit



Suggestions for creating an edited electronic version of your thesis which will be publicly available

• Use reduced quality illustrations with no copyright restrictions in your publicly available electronic version

• Insert blank pages to replace any illustrations, figures that cannot be copyright cleared. Use standard text eg This material is unavailable due to copyright restrictions

• Give more detail re. the blank pages by describing the material and retaining the numbering of the figures/illustrations so that they match your contents list eg Fig. x. Illustration of xxxxxxxxxxxx is unavailable due to copyright restrictions

• You may want to organize the uncleared material into an appendix file. This appendix will then not be made available as part of the publicly available electronic version.



Remember• this procedure is independent of the University policy on formal restrictions which can

be applied to theses. The public version will still be required to be released when the thesis restriction period expires so you will still need to deposit both electronic versions with us.

• In the unlikely event of a copyright holder contacting and telling us that illegal material is present then Research@StAndrews:FullText has a take down policy and material can be removed immediately

• Details of any omission in the electronic version will be described in the metadata for your thesis on Research@StAndrews:FullText

• If at some future date previously uncleared material can be cleared, then if you alert us we can make changes to the publicly available electronic version

• Contact us to discuss decisions on how to organize your material and your PDF file

Useful links

Submitting a thesis, electronic copy and print copy http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/library/resources/collections/theses/

Thesis declaration http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/media/library/documents/Thesis-declaration-Feb2014.pdf

Copyright information http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/students/rules/Copyright/

General help and contact for Research@StAndrews:[email protected]

Janet Aucock [email protected] x2299David Collins [email protected] x2302

Copyright Officer [email protected] x2776

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/library/resources/collections/theses/

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/media/library/documents/Thesis-declaration-Feb2014.pdf



mailto:[email protected]



electronic theses and copyright janet aucock head of repository services march 2014

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