Theses

This section is for postgraduate research students who will be submitting an online PhD or masters by research thesis as part of their degree.

Copyright: What is 'third party content'?

As an essential feature of scholarship, many theses will include text, images, or other materials that were originally created by other people: this is known as 'third party content'. Third party material that you incorporate into your thesis might include:

• Quotations and extracts from publications such as books or journals

• Reproductions of paintings, photographs or other artworks
• Reproductions of manuscripts or historical documents
• Models/diagrams copied as found from existing publications
• Maps reproduced from the Ordinance Survey or other published sources
• Patented material

Students sometimes believe that they can reproduce third party material in their thesis as long as they provide a reference to the original, but this is not necessarily the case. Providing a proper citation avoids intellectual theft (plagiarism), but third party content will often be protected by copyright, which is a legal and economic protection.

Within your thesis, you must always provide both a clear credit and reference for any third party content that you use, and also explain the legal rationale under which you believe you can reproduce it. See the next sections for more details.

Using third party content in your online thesis

Third party content is the intellectual property of other people, which means that you need a legal justification to reproduce the material in the version of your thesis that will be published online in the institutional repository of Oxford Brookes. Here are some conditions under which you can use third party content in your online thesis:

1. The work is 'out of copyright', meaning that the duration of copyright protection has expired and the work has entered the public domain.
2. A formal legal exception to copyright law means you can include the third party content in your online thesis without the permission of the copyright holder. These exceptions are perfectly legal and exist in order to allow existing knowledge to contribute to the generation of future knowledge.
3. The third party content has been given a blanket licence (e.g. a Creative Commons licence or the Open Government Licence) which allows you to use the material in your online thesis without contacting the copyright holder.

4. You have contacted the copyright owner of the third party material and they have given you explicit written permission to include the material in your online thesis. To request permission, first establish who the copyright holders are (there may be more than one, and it will frequently be an entity different from the creator of the content), try to contact them (here is a template letter that you can adapt), and keep records of all communications (separately from your Oxford Brookes email).

If none of the above conditions apply then you must submit two versions of your thesis to RADAR. One must be the complete version of your work that was formally examined for you to earn your degree. The second version will be made publicly available on RADAR and should remove any third party content.

This can be done individually or in bulk:

• Individually: remove each item of third party content that you cannot reproduce legally in the online version of your thesis but leave a similar amount of blank space in the redacted version so that the pagination remains unchanged.
• In bulk: when writing your thesis, put all of the third party content that you cannot reproduce legally in a single section of your online thesis (e.g. an appendix), then remove that particular section before uploading the redacted version of the thesis to RADAR. For example, Vaca’s thesis Surviving the modernist paradigm originally included an appendix containing illustrations, removed because works by the subject of the thesis, Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa (d. 1959), remained under copyright at the time the thesis was published.

Whichever way you remove the third party content, please remember these two key points:

1. Remember to include the bibliographic details of all the third party content in the main body of the text and/or in a separate section so that the readers of your online thesis can easily find the original sources for themselves. Ideally this will also include an electronic hyperlink to each resource (preferably a persistent link, e.g. a DOI).
2. For any third party content that you can reproduce legally in your online thesis, ensure that you state the justification clearly directly beneath the third party content (e.g. ‘Public domain’ or ‘Reproduced under the quotation exception, CDPA 1988 S.30’ or 'Used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence...' or 'Used with permission of the author/publisher/photographer/author/creator', etc.).

Sources of information relating to using third party content:

• General guidance on using third party content by the Intellectual Property Office of the UK Government
• Duration of copyright by Copyright User
• Quotation and copyright by Copyright User
• Using images by Oxford Brookes as part of a Moodle course called 'Copyright and Publication'
• Digital images, photographs, and the internet by the Intellectual Property Office of the UK Government
• Creative Commons licences are often used by publishers and authors to state how online materials can be reused by other people.

Personal data and issues of confidentiality

A separate but equally important legal and ethical issue involves the inclusion of personal data in your online thesis. If your research involves human participants, it is essential that you protect their confidentiality to the utmost. Before you initiated your project you will already have received formal approval from the Oxford Brookes University Research Ethics Committee (UREC) and you are obligated to fulfil the commitments that you undertook in your ethics application and the assurances that you provided to your participants when gaining their informed consent. Your thesis must always clearly state the UREC registration number and include copies of your Participant Information Sheet, GDPR privacy notice, and Consent form.

The thesis that you present for examination should already exclude any data that can identify your participants, so there should be no need to create two different versions. If, however, this is not the case, then you must submit two versions of your thesis to RADAR. One must be the complete version of your work that was formally examined for you to earn your degree. The second version will be made publicly available on RADAR and should carefully and irreversibly redact any data that might identify your subjects.

Sources of information on personal data:

• Data protection and privacy: considerations for research by Oxford Brookes
• Guidelines for informed consent by Oxford Brookes
• GDPR and Research – An Overview for Researchers (PDF) by UK Research and Innovation