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Guidance from Quality Handbook:
There are also examples of the thesis title and abstract pages in submission and completion section of the Quality Handbook.
In the unlikely event of a copyright holder contacting and telling us that illegal material is present then ePrints has a take down policy and material can be removed immediately pending further investigation.
For open access and institutional repository enquiries eprints@soton.ac.uk
For research data management queries please email ResearchData@soton.ac.uk
Need further help? Use our Library Research Skills support service
You, the student, own the copyright of the thesis.
However anything that was created by someone else, called third-party copyrighted material, still belongs to the people who created or published it. To use this material in your thesis you will need to have permission from the copyright holder or be allowed to use it as 'fair dealing'.
You will also need permission to re-use any of your own text, diagrams, extracts and data from previously published journal articles if you signed over your copyright to the publisher. However, most publishers allow you to keep the rights to distribute your own final version of your published work following peer-review but there are often certain conditions on this reuse. See using your own publications in your thesis for more guidance, this includes a list of academic publishers and details of their policies on reproducing material.
Copyright clearance is best done as and when material is found. See details below or watch our "Copyright and Theses" video (you will need to sign in to view).
Please note: while you should make best efforts to get permissions to reuse material, you will not be disadvantaged if permission is not granted or you cannot trace the copyright holder. You should not pay any fees to reuse copyrighted material. If the material is important to your argument, use it in your thesis. The outcome of your examination will not be affected in any way. See below for what to do if you have not been able to secure permission.
As part of the submission process you grant a deposit licence for your thesis. The deposit licence is non-exclusive and doesn't compromise your reuse of your thesis elsewhere. A cover sheet is added to the e-theses and contains an additional statement about your copyright ownership and protection.
Under UK law, you are allowed to use someone else's copyrighted work in your own work without directly seeking permission as long as you acknowledge the work and only use as much as is needed to illustrate your point..
However, you must fulfill the following criteria:
If you are at all unsure as to whether your use of the material is permitted, you must seek permission from the copyright owner.
For further information see guidance on copright exceptions on Open.Gov and also see our "Copyright and Theses" video (you will need to sign in to view).
Many journal publishers use a service called the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). Getting permission to reuse material from journal articles is relatively straightforward if a publisher uses the CCC. Follow links from the journal article webpage to 'permissions', 'reuse' or 'rights'.
The CCC form will ask you if you are the author of the material or not. Remember that unless you have published your journal article under a Creative Commons licence, you may still have to ask the publisher for permission to re-use it in your thesis. The form will also ask you to select currency however the vast majority of publishers allow re-production in theses for free.
If there are no links from the article's or book's webpage, you will have to contact the publisher's permissions and right's department. If the copyright holder does not use the CCC or does not have a web form to fill in, you will have to send an email. We have produced templates for requesting permissions for you to use.
If you are planning to use your own previously published articles in your thesis, you will need to check publisher agreements to see how copyright in each work needs to be managed. See using your own publications in your thesis for more guidance on this.
You should keep a copy of any letters or e-mails you received from rights holders and attach these to your Permission to Deposit Thesis form or if submitting via PGR Manager upload them to PGR Manager with your final thesis submission.
Many museums and galleries have a section on their website on reuse of their material. In many cases they will have a blanket permission or licence for reuse in scholarly activities. For example the National Gallery has a scholarly waiver and material on the Natural History Museum website is covered by the Open Government Licence. They often will give a form of words they want you to use to acknowledge their permission and/or have guidelines on how you reference their material, for example see the NHM requests you put © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. Licensed under the Open Government Licence.
If the museum/gallery/archive does not have a blanket licence/waiver or does not have a webform to fill in, you will have to send an email. We have produced templates for requesting permissions for you to use.
You should keep a copy of any letters or e-mails you received from rights holders and attach these to your Permission to Deposit Thesis form.
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am contacting you to seek permission to include the following material within the electronic version of my [PhD/MPhil] thesis:
[Provide full details of the material you intend to include]
If you are not the rights holder for this material I would be grateful if you would advise me who to contact.
The thesis will be made available via the University of Southampton’s online research repository (http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/). The repository is non-commercial and openly available to all.
Yours faithfully,
Your name
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am the author of the following work published by/due to be published by [insert publisher's name]:
[Provide full details of the material you intend to include]
This work is based on my PhD thesis, which I am required to deposit in the University of Southampton’s online research repository (http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/). The repository is non-commercial and openly available to all. The online version of the thesis is currently embargoed until [give end date for the embargo], after which it is due to be made publicly available. Therefore my thesis will contain material which is also contained in the work mentioned above.
I would be grateful if you could advise if this will be acceptable.
Yours faithfully,
[your name]
You should always acknowledge and reference the material you use. This sort of captioning is important. Quote the copyright holder and then give a standard statement eg. Reproduced with permission of the rights holder.
In your Acknowledgements state "permission to reproduce [figure no or name of item] ... has been granted by...".
If you have re-use material from your own previously published articles, remember to also list these on the Declaration of Authorship in your thesis.
You should keep a copy of any letters or e-mails you received from rights holders and attach these to your Permission to Deposit Thesis form.
The copyright holder may refuse permission or set an unaffordable fee for use.
You should not have to pay and you should not compromise the academic responsibility and conduct of your thesis if you cannot get copyright clearance, you have two options:
Please see our guidance on submitting a redacted thesis if you are thinking of removing material to an appendix.
Most journal publishers do not view a thesis as prior publication, for example, Elsevier, Institute of Physics, Nature, Springer and Wiley do not. See our using your own publications in your thesis guide for more information on individual publisher policies.
Therefore if you are planning to publish journal articles based on your PhD after you have submitted your thesis, you should not need an embargo. The Library can provide support and guidance if you have any issues with a journal editor assuming your thesis is a 'prior publication'. We have helped graduates in the past when editors have been unaware of the publishers' policies on prior publication and theses. Email eprints@soton.ac.uk
However if you are planning to publish material from your thesis in a longer format, such as an academic monograph (book), then publishers are more likely to want to the thesis to be locked down either side of the book's publication date. Therefore we would recommend you request an embargo at the time of final thesis submission. Please note, we cannot lock down theses which have been previously open. For more information see the restricting access page.
If you are a creative writing PhD student and are planning to publish your fiction separately, we recommended to deposit both a full copy of your thesis under an embargo, and a redacted, publicly available copy of the critical analysis at time of final submission..See our guidance on submitting a redacted copy.
In the unlikely event of a copyright holder contacting and telling us that illegal material is present then ePrints has a take down policy and material can be removed immediately while an investigation is carried out.
Advice on how to use material within copyright on a range of subjects.
International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM):
Guidelines for Quotation and Other Academic Uses of Excerpts from Journal Articles
The Society of Authors: Guide to Copyright and Permissions
The British Academy and the Publishers Association:
Joint Guidelines on Copyright and Academic Research - Guidelines for researchers and publishers in the Humanities and the Social Sciences.
DACS (Design and Artists Copyright Society):
Fair Dealing - Criticism and Review
Intellectual Property Office
Copyright: essential reading
This presentation goes through the steps of requesting permission to use third party copyright material in your work where you have found it in a journal article or a book. The examples given show how to make a request to clear material to include in a thesis, but this is the same process that you need to follow to clear copyright in material that you want to include in a paper or book. [The Copyright Clearance Center website has an updated look now (October 2023) but still operates in the same way]
Duration: 11 min
This presentation looks at copyright and your thesis. It includes an introduction to what copyright is, to copyright exceptions that apply to theses and the copyright declarations and statements you are required to make when submitting your thesis.
You will need to login to view this presentation.
Duration:25 mins
