Copyright Guide for Research

Copyright law protects the economic rights of authors and publishers by prohibiting copying of their works except in certain circumstances. Copyright protection begins when a work is created, whether written, photographed, recorded, etc., and lasts, in most cases, for 70 years from the end of the year of death of the author. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 sets out the circumstances where copying is permitted.

The most useful fair dealing exceptions for students and researchers are: 

• Private study or non-commercial research –  S. 29
• Text or data analysis - S. 29A
• Critique or review the work or Make a direct quote from a work –  S. 30
• Copy a work for the purposes of caricature, parody and pastiche - S. 30A
• Perform a play or reading for educational purposes –  S. 34
• Play a sound recording, film or broadcast for educational purposes –  S. 34 

More information on the exceptions is available from Gov.UK

Copyright protection begins when a work is created. Once it has expired, anyone can use or copy the work. The duration of  copyright depends on several factors including the type of work, whether it is published or unpublished, whether the creator is known or unknown and whether transitional arrangements from previous copyright legislation apply. The list below is a useful guide to start from when deciding if material is still in copyright.

'Fair dealing’ is a concept allowable in UK Copyright Law . Many of the education exceptions rely on this concept of fair dealing and are often referred to as the 'fair dealing exceptions'.  Unlike The CLA ( Copyright Licensing Agency) Higher Education Licence, the amounts that can be copied are not defined. Because  there are no are no defined limits of what is fair, each individual must make a judgment and decide whether their copying is fair if they are relying on 'fair dealing' as their defence. Questions that might help you decide whether the use is fair are:

•  Is the amount copied reasonable and appropriate to the context?
•  Have I copied no more than I need to?
•  Does the copying negatively affect sales of the work?
•  Have I acknowledged the work appropriately?

Unless there is a specific reason why you cannot acknowledge the sources, there must always be sufficient acknowledgment of the copyright owner and source of the material if the use is to be considered fair.

Copyright law does allow referenced quotation of other people's work. If you have used 3rd party copyright material, usually you should be able to rely on one of the 'fair dealing' exceptions such as illustration for instruction, or criticism, review or quotation to include this material for the purpose of examination. Remember the use must be fair. i.e. you have used only what you need to and  you must provide a citation.

The fair dealing exclusions may also cover the use of very small amounts of 3rd party copyright material in the e-thesis but our advice, and best practice, is to contact the rights holder to ask for permission to include the material in your e-thesis if the use is not covered by a licence that allows you to use the material in this way. Remember if a copyright owner challenged the use of their material in your e-thesis you would need to be confident that you could defend its inclusion using one of the copyright exceptions.  

Obtaining permission to use 3rd party copyright content can be a lengthy process so we recommend that you start as soon as possible. If the rights holder does not reply within a reasonable length of time, you should contact them again, as you cannot interpret a lack of response as permission to go ahead. You can use or adapt the suggested wording below when contacting the copyright owner for permission but if you need advice on contacting copyright owners, email repository@abertay.ac.uk.

 Dear Sir/Madam

I am a PhD student at Abertay University and I am contacting you to seek permission to include the following material within the electronic version of my PhD thesis:

[Provide full details of the material you intend to include]

The thesis will be deposited in the university's open access repository, https://rke.abertay.ac.uk/, which is a non-commercial repository and openly available to all. A copy of the thesis will also be available from the British Library Electronic Thesis service EThOS. A full citation will be included to acknowledge the copyright holder of the material included in the thesis.

If you are not the rights holder for this material I would be grateful if you could let me know who I should contact for permission. If you require any further information, please let me know.

Thank you for your help.

Yours faithfully

If you are unable to obtain permission to include the copyright material in your e-thesis you can choose to submit a redacted thesis . The inclusion of copyright material in your e-thesis requiring an embargo should be detailed on the Thesis and Data Embargo Request Form (RD08) available from the research support pages. If you need to submit a redacted thesis to Abertay's Open Access repository, email repository@abertay.ac.uk for advice.

Students are never expected to pay fees requested by copyright owners to include 3rd party copyright material in their e-thesis. 

A good credit would allow the person reading it to know the source of the material.

For print materials, these would be similar to the information for referencing. For online materials it would be author, title, URL and licence if known. If using CC0 material a credit is not required but it is always thought best practice to include one if possible.

For example if  including images, then figure legends for any images that you reproduce should provide information about the image and its source in accordance with your department's/discipline's referencing style. You should also identify the rights-holder (e.g. "Copyright ©2024 BBC"), reiterate any copyright statements or licensing terms indicated at the source (e.g. "All rights reserved", or "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License") and   if you have obtained written permission to use the content, add this additional information e.g., "Image reproduced by kind permission from  XXXXXXXX. 

Guidance on crediting 3rd party images is available from https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/best_practices_for_attribution 

There  are also 2 useful guides:

Managing third party copyright for research publications. Guidance produced by UKRI

Publishing under the UKRI open access policy: copyright and Creative Commons licences. guidance produced by Jisc

Although both are written to help UKRI funded publications, they contain general guidance where the research publication contains 3rd party copyright material. 

If you want to include the published version of research papers or book chapters in your thesis, this may be possible:

• If you retained the copyright of the article or chapter.
• If the article was published under a Creative Commons License.
• If the publisher allows you to include the published version in your e-thesis.

However, in many cases when publishing their research, authors transfer the copyright of their material to the publisher. If you have not retained the copyright then you will need to write to the publisher to ask for permission to include for example the published article in your e-thesis as it is is unlikely that the fair dealing exception would cover this. (However, remember inclusion of the articles in your examination copy would usually be covered by one of the fair dealing exceptions).

If you are unable to add the published version of the article to your thesis, then it may be possible to add the post-print version of the article to your e-thesis. You can use Sherpa/Romeo service to check the publisher's copyright and self-archiving policies, and library staff are happy to advise on this. Email: repository@abertay.ac.uk for advice. 

The ideal is to make your e-thesis openly available with no redacted or embargoed content, and students are expected to make best efforts to seek permission. However, if you are unable to obtain permission because the rights owner does not reply / wants to charge you for using the material /  or the task of tracing the rights owner is very onerous, then you will not be penalised if you need to redact 3rd party copyright material from your e-thesis. If you need to redact material from your e-thesis then please email: repository@abertay.ac.uk for advice. 

Creative Commons Licences provide a simple and clear method for licensing the reuse of a copyright-protected work. 

For copyright owners, they provide everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law.

For those wishing to use 3rd party copyright material, the presence of a Creative Commons license on a copyrighted work answers the question, “What can I do with this work?” All the reuse information is included with the licence.

The Creative Commons web site offers a choice of predefined licences using concise symbols that can be combined in different ways to produce six different licence options. Full details of each licence are provided on their website.

When presenting your research at a conference, copyright guidance concerning the incorporation of other people’s work into your research still applies.

You should ensure you have permission to use any 3rd party materials unless the material is licensed for reuse with a Creative Commons License or copyright has expired. You may also be able to use extracts of works under one of the fair dealing exceptions, , e.g., s30 Criticism, review, quotation . However, bear in mind that many conference presentations are recorded and shared online making any breaches of copyright a higher risk. If you need further advice, email repository@abertay.ac.uk .

The answer is maybe but caution is required as some publishers do not allow sharing of work on 'for-profit' or commercial repositories, which both these websites are.

If you want to share full text versions of your articles in this way you should check the version of the work that the publishers permit sharing via these platforms. If you article is published open access with a licence that allows the published version to be shared in this way then that would be ok. 

If the work is not published open access then, usually, you will not be able to post the published version of the work and will only be able to provide a link to it.

Some publishers (but not all) will allow an earlier version of the work, the accepted manuscript, to be shared  on institutional repositories but often there will be an embargo period before this version can be made openly available to others.  It is also important that you check the terms of use for the service where you are uploading content. It is  worth noting that many of these services clearly state that it is the profile owner who is responsible for ensuring that they have permission to upload any 3rd party copyright material. 

In most cases, a full text version of your research output will already be available from Abertay's Open Access repository. All open access content posted on Abertay's repository has been checked to ensure that it compiles with the publisher's self-archiving policy. You can always provide a link to the repository version from websites such as ResearchGate if the published version is not available open access.