Many graduate students publish their research prior to finalizing their thesis or dissertation. Indeed, in some fields, dissertations are comprised of one or more papers, with little other material.
It’s confusing, therefore, when you prepare to finish your thesis or dissertation, and suddenly realize that you might have signed away your copyright! If you don’t own the copyright to your work, can you in fact include the paper in your dissertation or thesis? Good question!
First, the University does not evaluate your dissertation or thesis for copyright issues. It’s up to you to assess copyright concerns with included content, from quotes and screenshots, to your own published papers.
When you write a paper, you are the copyright owner of the manuscript. If you wrote it with other people, then you and your co-authors are the joint copyright owners of the manuscript. At that point, each author can do whatever they want with their manuscript—including transferring the copyright to someone else, or retaining it.
When you publish a paper, almost all publishers require a publication contract. That publication contract specifies whether you keep your contract, transfer it, transfer some of the copyright rights, or all of them. You can, and should, negotiate to keep all the rights you will need, including the right to include your published paper in your thesis or dissertation. (It’s standard in all academic fields to acknowledge first publication, but the format depends on the field.)
But what if you didn’t negotiate, and you transferred your copyright to the publisher? At this point, you have three real options.
(1) Campus or Funder Open Access Policy. If your work was funded by a US federal government agency, or another funder with an open access requirement, then your rights to re-use the work will almost certainly be protected. Also, if one of your co-authors is a faculty member at an institution with an open access policy (such as the Open Access policy at UMass Amherst), then you would have rights under the OA policy. The UMass OA policy was instituted by the Faculty Senate starting in 2016, so any papers published since then would be covered. The faculty member author needs to upload the paper to the campus repository (ScholarWorks) to perfect their claim under the OA policy.
Some campuses include graduate students in their campus open access policy. At UMass, graduate students can opt in to the policy, but they must do so before publishing. You may have co-authors at other institutions, and if they have open access policies, you will probably be able to take advantage of your rights.
(2) Check your publication contract for possible rights. Many publishers specifically allow inclusion of papers in authors’ dissertations. You would need to look at your publishing agreement to see what it says. Your liaison librarians or the Copyright Education Service at the UMass Libraries can help you review those agreements and understand whether you have rights or not.
(3) Ask for permission to reprint. If you transferred the copyright, don’t have rights under an OA policy, and the publication contract you signed didn’t retain any rights for yourself, then you should probably ask for permission to reprint. The publisher may ask for a fee, depending on your field and the publication.
What about fair use? Fair use is a doctrine in copyright law that allows people to use third-party content without permission, so long as the use is a fair use (17 USC 107). (See the “fair use explainer” for more information.) All sorts of uses can be fair uses, depending on the specific facts. Fair uses can include quotations, personal copies for research, satires, indexing, and many other uses — but it always depends on the circumstances, and any of those uses might be infringing in some circumstances, and fair in others. While it is impossible to say definitively without knowing the specific circumstances, reprinting a published article in its entirety in a new work (such as a dissertation) would not usually be a good candidate for fair use.
Isn’t it just normal and expected? In some fields, it is quite conventional to use published papers as a chapter in a dissertation or thesis, either modified or as published. However, you should still check with your publisher (ideally before the work is published) to make sure you are both in agreement with this expectation.
The Library’s “Copyright Education Program” librarians are happy to talk with you if you have questions about your prior publications and your thesis or dissertation. Contact us for an appointment.