Q. What are the copyright implications if I want to publish my PhD thesis in whole or in part?

By default, copyright in your thesis belongs to you, the author, under Section 11 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA) 1988. This does not apply to third party copyright of work that you have quoted or reproduced within your thesis, which may include data, figures, quotations and other works. Copyright ownership of these remain with the original rights owner.

Publishing your thesis will involve making editing and post peer-review amendments to meet publication and editorial standards and will therefore create a new original work with separate copyright protection. For the avoidance of doubt, while some publishing entities offer services which reproduce or compile thesis collections or database, reproducing your thesis in this way, or archiving in a repository, is not considered publishing. 

Copyright transfer agreements (CTAs)

A publisher may ask you to transfer copyright to them as part of the publishing agreement or CTA. Or, you may be asked if you would like to publish open access for which there is often a charge. With some open access agreements, you may be able to retain copyright ownership of your work, which will allow you to archive it and make it readily available for further research. 

Third party copyright material and rights clearance

Copyright in any third party material within your publication is not transferred, either to you or your publisher, so you may need to obtain copyright clearance to include it in your published work, or work which is commercially reproduced. This will usually be the case for any figures, photographs and tables that you reproduce or adapt in your work. Any substantial use of third party material will also need rights clearance.

It is not usually necessary to clear rights for insubstantial fair dealing under statutory provisions which support scholarly work, such as quotation, criticism and review (see Section 30 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988). The use must meet the criteria of any exception applied.

Note that 'substantial' use needs permission and may be defined in terms of the quality of content copied, not just quantity, as established in Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd v Marks & Spencer plc [2001] UKHL 38, [2003] 1 AC 551, [2001] 3 All ER 977.

University thesis requirements

All Brunel theses are permanently archived in BURA, the University's open access research repository and in the British Library's national thesis collection, EThOS. This requirement should be disclosed to your publisher. Where the availability of your thesis may affect your ability to sell copies of a published work, it is possible to place it under embargo for a limited period. This is not effective once a thesis has already been available in the repository and it will remain in the national database where it can be requested under statutory exceptions in UK copyright law. 

If you know that you intend to publish or commercially exploit your thesis when you submit it for examination and believe this is likely to prejudice the chance of it being accepted for publication, you may wish to apply for an embargo to delay its public release in BURA. An embargo request must be approved by your supervisor and the University. You may also need to do so, if the thesis contains information relating to other forms of commercialisable intellectual property, such as patents, confidential information or research data from ongoing research.  If this is the case, seek further advice from your supervisor in the first instance.

For more information see the links below.