Copyright rules when you upload your dissertation to Pure
When you upload your dissertation, we ask you to confirm whether you allow electronic publication.
If you click ”yes” to having your file for the assessment committee published, this file will be published via Pure when your dissertation has been accepted for oral defense. As the author, you keep all rights to the dissertation.
Copyright rules for article-based dissertations
If you write a dissertation based on articles, you need these points cleared before submitting it to Pure:
- Copyright for your articles, if you want them to be part of the electronically published version of the dissertation. If the publishers will not permit parallel publication of your articles in a dissertation, you can instead refer to the article at the publisher’s website via a link or a DOI in your dissertation.
- If your dissertation contains copyrighted articles and parallel publication is not permitted, you should mark this in Pure by clicking “redacted version can be published, requires written permission”. This makes it possible to upload another document which does not contain the articles, and this version will then be published electronically. The full version of the dissertation, including full text versions of all articles, will only be sent to the assessment committee.
- If your PhD thesis consists of a collection of papers, you must have obtained signed co-author statements.
- If you have articles which have been submitted but not yet accepted for publication, we recommend that you ask the publisher for permission for parallel publication, if you want the article to be part of the electronically published version of your dissertation.
Copyright: general information
If your dissertation contains pictures, tables, or figures, you must always have permission from their original creator(s) to reproduce them.
If you use pictures and figures, there are a few exceptions to this:
- In Denmark, the artist’s copyright runs for 70 years after the death of the artist. To be precise, it becomes invalid at the end of the seventieth year after the year of death; after that, you do not need permission to reproduce the picture.
- Pictures and other materials which have been placed under a Creative Commons (CC) or similar license, may also be used without a permission for reproduction.
- More about Creative Commons: www.creativecommons.org
Several publishers have made guidelines for reusing published manuscripts in a PhD dissertation. We recommend that you look at the home pages of the relevant publisher(s).
Our recommendations
To make it clear that you are following copyright rules, we recommend the following:
If you reuse entire articles, we recommend that you insert a piece of text which mentions that you have obtained permission to do so. This can be done in various ways.
If you click this link, you will see three different examples. One refers to a manuscript which had been submitted to a journal, but where it was not yet known whether it would be accepted for publication in the journal.
Evgenios Vlachos has given us permission to use these examples from his PhD-dissertation.
If you use tables, figures and such, we also recommend that you mention specifically that you have obtained permission to reproduce them, if this is required. This can be done e.g. in a figure text, in which you mention that the publisher (e.g. Springer Nature) has permitted reproduction.
There is no formal requirement that you should point out to the reader that you follow copyright rules, but this makes it transparent to the reader of your dissertation. The reader will also know where to ask for permission, if they also want to reproduce the material.