Completing your studies

1. You must acknowledge and cite any third party copyright material that you reuse in your thesis.
2. You may reuse any third party copyright material which is not a ‘substantial’ part of a work without permission from the copyright-owner: but note that ‘substantial’ is not defined in English law, and may be interpreted qualitatively as well as quantitatively.
3. You may also reuse a ‘substantial’ part of a work without permission from the copyright-owner, but only on certain conditions.  Section 32 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act (CDPA) 1988 allows you to reuse material for the purpose of "illustration for instruction"; this includes examinations, and examinations in turn are taken to include examined doctoral theses. The law says that you must ‘deal fairly’ with material when you reuse it for this purpose which requires a certain amount of judgement on your part. However, to help qualify for fair dealing you must satisfy the following criteria:
   • ensure the work is used for non-commercial purposes;
   • provide sufficient acknowledgement, unless it is impractical to do so;
   • ensure the use of the work does not compete with the normal exploitation of it by the rights holder;
   • ensure that the use of the work is not excessive (e.g. copying the whole work when only an extract is required).
4. If and when you pass your examination, you will be required to deposit an electronic version of your thesis (an e-thesis) in the Research Repository, which will incorporate any amendments or corrections that your examiners have stipulated. This version will be made freely available on the internet (by means of a CC BY-NC-ND licence). In order to reuse third party copyright material in your e-thesis, depending on how much you use it may be possible for you to rely on Section 30 of the CDPA 1988. This allows you to reuse material for the purpose of “criticism or review”, again provided that you ‘deal fairly’ with the material. You must judge for yourself what the copyright-owner is likely to regard as ‘fair’ in this context and satisfy the criteria outlined above in section 3. Please note that photographs are not covered under ‘fair dealing’ and you will need permission to re-use copyright photographs in your e-thesis.
5. If you wish to reuse material in a way which is not covered by Sections 30 or 32 of the CDPA 1988, you must get permission from the copyright owner.  You may well need permission to reuse the following:
   • long quotations;
   • tables;
   • figures, such as diagrams, graphs and charts;
   • photographs;
   • maps;
   • artistic works, such as paintings and sketches;
   • printed music;
   • audio or video recordings.
6. If you have already published part of your thesis (e.g. in a journal), you may have assigned copyright in it to the publisher. In this case you may need to get permission from the publisher to reuse your own work.
7. If you would like any help or advice about reusing third party copyright material in your thesis, please contact the University Copyright and Licensing Manager:
   E-mail:  copyright@lboro.ac.uk;    Website: https://www.lboro.ac.uk/services/library/copyright/

Students are required to deposit a copy of the final version of their Ph.D. thesis, as approved by their Examiners, in electronic format in the University’s Research Repository.

Each thesis will be made freely available on the web via the University’s Research Repository, unless the thesis is Restricted or Confidential.

The research degree will not be awarded until the electronic version has been deposited with the University.

Purpose

• To enable online access which will significantly increase theses’ visibility, which in turn leads to greater citation of students’ research.
• To store and preserve theses with a stable link that the theses’ authors can always reference.

Procedures

You should submit an electronic copy of the thesis to the Research Repository.

• The electronic copy should be identical to the final version of the examined copy except where third-party copyright material has been removed.
• In the event that third-party copyright material is removed in order to make the thesis publicly available, a complete version of the thesis will also need to be deposited. The complete version will be held on closed access and not be made available.
• The electronic copy should be submitted as one file in PDF format.
• A signed “Certificate of Originality Thesis Access Conditions and Deposit Agreement” will need to be bound into the soft bound print copies of the thesis for examination.
• The Certificate gives permission for the electronic version to be deposited in the Research Repository and declares that all necessary copyright permissions have been cleared.
• After examination the signed “Certificate of Originality, Thesis Access Conditions and Deposit Agreement” should be scanned and submitted with the electronic thesis as a separate file. Scanning of the signed document is essential as the original signatures of the student and supervisor are required.
• Permission for the use of third-party copyright material should be obtained or the material removed.
• Moratorium (embargo) periods can be applied to e-theses. In these cases the theses will not be made available in the Research Repository or via EThOS until the end of the moratorium period.

EThOS

Most UK universities offer electronic theses as part of a national movement led by the British Library’s EThOS (Electronic Theses Online System) service in which Loughborough University is a participant.

British theses are made freely available on the EThOS website. It is therefore necessary for all students to sign the “Certificate of Originality, Thesis Access Conditions and Deposit Agreement”, which permits the British Library to make the thesis available while retaining their rights as the copyright owner. If you are in any doubt, please contact the University Copyright Officer.

If a student does not want their thesis made freely available by the British Library it will be necessary to place a moratorium period on the thesis.

Online availability

E-thesis records will be made available in the Research Repository once the Doctoral College Office have undertaken their necessary processes and notified the Library that they have added the author’s name to their official pass list. At busy times this may take a few weeks, therefore there will usually be a delay before your thesis record is visible in the Research Repository.

Updated April 2019