Comments on: What about the dissertations?

By: Anjali

Anjali — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:01:39 +0000

What is the case if a professor picks out a students PhD thesis work (submitted by the student,but not published and the doctorate not granted) and publishes it as his own ?

Does the student have any rights under copyright law in the UK. ?

Any answer or guidance will be appreciated.
Thanks

By: Sarah Shreeves

Sarah Shreeves — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:22:16 +0000

I generally agree with Peter Hirtle on this (and since I am in the midst of an ETD pilot have been thinking about this a lot). Just to offer some data (of an admittedly very small sample size!), of the 14 self-submitted dissertations in our repository (see http://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/handle/2142/5131), 3 authors classify the dissertation as ‘published’, 9 as ‘unpublished’, and 2 don’t say either way. This is an optional checkbox (with two choices “published or submitted for publication” or “unpublished”) available during the submission process in IDEALS.

I’d also say that much of the angst around ETD’s revolves around this question of publication. We recently had a mini-uproar over ProQuest’s use of the term publishing or publication – this, in particular, seems problematic for humanities faculty.

By: Owen Stephens

Owen Stephens — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:29:16 +0000

In the UK, there seems to be agreement that dissertations are not generally regarded as ‘published’ if just made available in print format in the library of the awarding institution. However, the recently launched EThOS service from the British Library (http://ethos.bl.uk) which will digitise dissertations on request, has considered that digitising a dissertation and making it available on the web does constitute publication in the UK.

I’m not sure how much this applies to the US situation, but perhaps the most significant aspect of the question of ‘publication’ for EThOS was the impact on any material used within the thesis where the copyright belonged to a third party. Inclusion of this type of material has traditionally been accepted in dissertations ‘for the purposes of examination’. Quoting from the EThOS Toolkit (http://ethos.ac.uk):

“Traditionally in the UK, for the purposes of examination, inclusion of such copyright material held by a third party has been tolerated as the thesis has not been considered as formally published. This unpublished status has lead to restricted dissemination of this research. In any legal sense, making something available on the Internet is communication to the public. Greater visibility through electronic distribution has materially changed the character of the thesis instilling a greater perceived risk of plagiarism, premature disclosure of results and copyright infringement than the traditional counterpart ever could.”

By: Peter Hirtle

Peter Hirtle — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:24:04 +0000

So this issue came up in two recent informal surveys of librarians. Specialists in ILL and preservation tended to think of dissertations as published, since they had codex form and looked like other published items in the library.

Library legal experts, however, tended to few dissertations as unpublished – primarily because dissertation authors view them as unpublished. They have to, because many monograph and journal publishers will refuse to consider items that had been previously “published.”

In a chapter on dissertations in a forthcoming book on “Copyright and Cultural Institutions,” I note that UC Berkeley states that “Your doctoral dissertation is a published work that announces the results of your research.” Apparently their is a ruling by the attorney for the Regents of the Cal system that states that shelving a thesis in the library causes it to enter the public domain. UCLA, however, states that “doctoral dissertations are to be treated in the same manner as unpublished, copyrighted works.”

My take on the issue: I would prefer that we follow authorial intent rather than a strict parsing of the law. A dissertation that was registered and not renewed would be in the public domain. A dissertation that had never been registered is still unpublished (even if a technical determination could be made that publication had occurred and the work was unceremoniously tossed into the public domain.”