All Queen’s PGR students are required to upload an electronic copy of their final thesis to Pure. Pure is the University's Current Research Information System. All PGRs will have an account in Pure.
Making your thesis available electronically has a number of benefits for you as the author and for the University as a research institution. However, there are copyright implications that you must be aware of. This guide explains the most important copyright issues that you need to consider. It is not a comprehensive guide to copyright law.
For more information on copyright and your e-thesis, please contact Dawn Pike, Open Research Librarian.
UK Copyright Law: Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Copyright is the legal right that protects the use of your work once your idea has been physically expressed
Copyright in the UK is free and automatic Lifetime of the author plus 70 years
Unlike a patent or trademark, you don’t need to register your work or pay a fee to ensure your rights are protected by copyright.
Copyright protects your work and stops others from using it without your permission.
You automatically get copyright protection within the UK when you create:
You can mark your work with the copyright symbol (©), your name and the year of creation. Whether you mark the work or not doesn’t affect your protection level.
How does it work?
Copyright prevents people from:
In your thesis, you will most likely use and build upon other people’s work, for example, quotations, photos, maps, diagrams, tables, musical scores etc., which may be protected via copyright. This is referred to as using third-party copyright (essentially copyright that doesn't belong to you).
There are ‘fair dealing’ exceptions to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act which allow limited re-use of copyright works without permission from the owner, if it is reasonable and fair to do so. The exception that will be most applicable to your postgraduate research will be for criticism, review and quotation.
This exception allows reuse of copyright works without permission in order to critique or review a creator’s original work
Similarly, extracts of copyright works can be used without permission for quotation in other contexts, such as using a short quote in a history book or an academic article.
You can use as much of the third party material that is 'fair' to demonstrate your criticism, review or quotation, and there may even be circumstances where it is fair to use the whole of a piece of work, for example, a short poem or a photograph. Ultimately, the decision to rely on the criticism, review and quotation exception must be taken on a case by case basis.
A useful guide on this exception can be found on the Copyright user website.
The fair dealing exceptions to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA) are so called because the way you use the work must be considered ‘fair’.
There is no clear definition in the CDPA legislation as to what ‘fair dealing’ is, but it is useful to ask yourself: how would a fair-minded and honest person have dealt with the work?
A few further things to consider before relying on the criticism and review exception include:
Does using the work affect the market for the original work? If a use of a work acts as a substitute for it, causing the owner to lose revenue, then it is not likely to be fair. There is no set amount of material allowed or forbidden but the use cannot be systematic or excessive. Do not rely on word counts. Ask yourself does it need to be included? You need to assess the risk.
Is the amount of the work taken reasonable and appropriate? Was it necessary to use the amount that was taken? For example, copying an entire book or a significant part of it would not be considered fair.
Acknowledgement: The source of the material must be acknowledged, except in cases where this is impossible.
For more advice, contact: d.pike@qub.ac.uk