Copyright and licences

Copyright policies

University of Northampton copyright policies for works created by staff and students are covered in the Intellectual Property Policy, available from the Policies, Procedures and Regulations page.

In the majority of cases copyright of student work (including doctoral theses) remains with the student, while the copyright of work created by an employee in the course of their employment (such as journal articles created by a member of academic staff) is owned  by the University. The Intellectual Property Policy explains these arrangements in more detail.

Further advice on copyright is provided by Library & Learning Services in their guide to copyright and licensing in Higher Education, including information on exceptions to copyright and fair dealing.

The Intellectual Property Office also offers an official guide to exceptions to copyright.

Creative Commons licences

Creative Commons (CC) licences are an internationally recognised means of waiving certain aspects of copyright in order to facilitate and encourage the dissemination, sharing, and reuse of any kind of authored work. They are a way of enabling Open Access for research outputs and data.

Funders and publishers may require a CC licence to be added to outputs such as journal articles, or to support materials such as datasets. University of Northampton researchers can apply and manage CC licences for any item added to Pure.

Doctoral students are also encouraged to consider applying a CC licence to their thesis as part of the submission process.

The licence options are explained on the Creative Commons licences page. Two of the most common options are CC-BY, which allows the work to be freely shared and reused providing appropriate credit is given, and CC-BY-NC-ND, which requires the work to be shared in its original form only, and for non-commercial purposes only.

The CC-BY icon is displayed on works using this licence.

Creative Commons elements can be combined to create the most suitable licence for each work. The University recommends a CC-BY licence where possible to maximise the potential and reach of academic outputs. The Research Support team are happy to advise on the use of CC licences.

Copyright and theses

All doctoral theses are deposited in Pure, the University’s research repository. Deposit is managed by the Graduate School as part of the submission process. The full text of the thesis will be made available open access via Pure and the British Library’s EThOS repository.

Making theses available in this way has a number of advantages:

• Theses are directly discoverable by search engines, improving dissemination and increasing the chance of citation and subsequent collaboration.
• Pure gives each thesis a stable URL, allowing authors to monitor impact by tracking citations and downloads, as well as supporting and verifying authorship and provenance.

The submission process includes the opportunity to add a Creative Commons licence to a thesis, to support and encourage sharing and reuse. Please see our explanation of Creative Commons licences for more information.

Use of third-party content in a thesis is subject to the standard rights, restrictions, and exemptions of UK copyright law. Details are available from the Libguides pages on Copyright and licensing in Higher Education. A redacted version of a thesis may be submitted to Pure in cases not covered by standard usage rights and exemptions.

In certain circumstances, for example where there are commercial or political sensitivities, students may embargo their thesis for an approved period. For further information on thesis embargo options, please refer to the Research Student Toolkit.

There has been concern in the past that open access to theses may be regarded as “prior publication” and prevent future development into a monograph. As a thesis would generally require significant revision before being published as a monograph, many publishers do not require the thesis to be embargoed. However, if you intend to develop your thesis into a monograph, researchers should contact potential publishers before making a decision about embargo periods, as publisher policies vary considerably. The academic community has created a spreadsheet of publisher policies on prior publication, which may be helpful.