E-thesis deposit - Managing 3rd party copyright

When is permission required?
Guidelines to seeking permissions to reuse others' copyright works in your dissertation
Reuse of own publications
What if permission is granted?
What if permission is not granted?

If you wish to include content created by others e.g.excerpts, quotations, tables etc. you will in many cases have to ask for permission to reuse this material in order to be able to make the thesis available in DSpace@Cambridge. Authors are strongly advised to clear copyright and obtain permissions for use in DSpace@Cambridge from third party rights holders as you gather your resources, rather than leaving it to the point where you write up your thesis.

The DSpace team will consult selected theses deposited to verify 3rd party copyright and may contact the author to verify that rights are well managed in cases where a thesis contains material where copyright clearly is owned by others. We also provide training regarding rights management if this is of interest.

When is permission required?

In making your dissertation available on-line in DSpace@Cambridge UK Copyright legislation does allow you to use short quotations, extracts or excerpts from others’ works without the permission of the copyright owner if the work is out-of-copyright or your use meets the requirements of ‘fair dealing for the purposes of criticism or review’.

A guidance note entitled Permissions for use of quotations, extracts or excerpts from others’ works in your dissertation to be published in DSpace@Cambridge should be consulted before submitting your thesis to DSpace@Cambridge. A sample permissions letter has also be created in order to simplify the permission seeking process.

If you have consulted the guidance note and are still uncertain about what permissions are required, please contact the DSpace@Cambridge team for further assistance.

Reuse of own publications

If you wish to include academic papers or other content that has already been published you need to check if the publisher will permit you to include these in your thesis. In the original publishing process you will have signed a "Transfer of copyright agreement" or its equivalent. This should indicate whether or not you have rights to reuse the article in your thesis. If the agreement does not mention reuse then the publisher should be contacted in order to acquire appropriate permission. Please note that many publishers have different policies on use of articles for inclusion in these than for self archiving purposes as indicated in the Sherpa Romeo database. It is therefore recommended that the publisher is contacted directly.

What if permission is granted

If a positive response to your permission request is received you should include details about this at the appropriate place in your thesis, e.g. "Permission to reproduce this [details of content ] has been granted by [ rights holder information] ". Letters or emails confirming permissions should be kept secure and made available for consultation if any questions relating to rights were to be raised.

What if permission is not granted

If permission for reuse of 3rd party copyright materials cannot be negotiated it is possible to work around this by limiting access to sections of a thesis or by removing the particular sections from the thesis completely. For further details, please contact the DSpace@Cambridge team.

 

Reproduced and adapted for use with kind permission of the University of Glasgow and University of Oxford thesis services.