E-Mobility and Clean Growth : Theses

Third-Party access to your theses

Including third party copyright material in your thesis

From 2008, students who have successfully completed a research degree programme will be asked to provide an electronic version of their thesis to be made available in the institutional repository. Consequently, you will need to seek permission if you want to include any third party copyright material, e.g. extracts from publications, or illustrations such as images, maps, photographs, tables etc. in your thesis. Traditionally it has been accepted that third party copyright material can be include in a print version of a thesis without seeking permission. However, it is good academic practice to do this and this is essential if your thesis is going to be made available online.

Please note that while students are being asked to make best efforts to seek permission to include third party copyright material in electronic versions of their thesis, you will not be penalised if it is not possible to gain permission, either because permissions are not granted or because it would be too expensive to obtain permissions. This will simply mean that we will not be able to make your thesis available online. The outcome of your examination will not be affected in anyway. No student will be required to make any payments to copyright holders for material they wish to include in their thesis.

What to seek permission for

If you have included a short quotation from a published work and have acknowledged and referenced it appropriately it is probably not necessary for you to seek permission from the copyright holder. Copyright law does not define what is meant by a short extract, and if you are in doubt it is probably best to seek permission. Ideally, you should seek permissions as you go rather than at the point of writing up your thesis.If you intend to include material that you have published elsewhere, e.g. journal articles, you need to check that if the publisher will allow you to include theses as part of your thesis. The easiest way to do this is to contact the publisher directly and check. You will need to give the complete citation for the published work that you wish to include and specifically ask permission to include this work in within the electronic version of your thesis which will be made available in Coventry University'’'s online research repository

How to seek permissions

In order to seek permission to include third party copyright material within the electronic version of your thesis you will need to contact the rights holder. The rights holder of the work you want to use may be the author, illustrator or publisher etc. We would suggest that you contact the publisher in the first instance. Many publishers give details on their websites of how to seek permissions and who to contact. Look for information on rights / permissions / copyright clearance. If the publisher does not hold the rights to the work they should forward your enquiry to whoever does. The Society of Authors provides guidance on how to ask for permissions and the circumstances when this is likely to be required. The database WATCH (Writers Artists and Their Copyright Holders) maintained by the University of Texas is a useful resource when searching for copyright holders, especially within the arts.

If the rights holder does not reply immediately, you may want to contact them again. Please note that you may not regard a lack of response as permission to include third party material in your thesis.

A template letter to request copyright permissions is available at the bottom of this page.

If permission is granted

If permission is granted you should indicate this at the appropriate point of your thesis, e.g. 'Permission to reproduce [make reference to the exact material included] has been granted by [name of the rights holder].' You should keep copies of any letters or emails that you receive from rights holders.

If permission is denied

If you need to include third party copyright material in your thesis and are unable to obtain permission to do this you will not be able to make a full version of your thesis publicly available online. You may wish to deposit an additional edited version in the university repository with this material removed. The edited version will be made publicly available, but the full electronic version that you are required to submit for examination purposes will not.Where material has been removed in the edited version a place holder should be inserted into your thesis e.g. ‘Figure (text, illustration etc.) has been removed due to copyright restrictions.’

Help and advice

If in doubt about whether you need to get permission to include any material within your thesis it is always best to err on the side of caution and assume that you do. If you have specific queries you can send these to oa.lib@coventry.ac.uk and the Repository staff will do their best to help you.

Formatting your thesis

Thesis layout and presentation

Information regarding the University guidelines regarding the layout and presentation of your thesis are available in the form of the Postgraduate Research Thesis & Submission: Information and Guidance document available from the Doctoral College's Procedural documents. 

For discipline specific format requirements not otherwise covered in the document linked to above, please contact your Director of Studies.

Conversion to PDF

The required format for deposit in the Theses Service is PDF. It is assumed that you will be using a standard piece of software to create the electronic version of your thesis, e.g. Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer or LaTeX. Before you deposit your thesis you need to convert it to PDF format. Ideally your thesis should consist of a single PDF file. However, it is acceptable to deposit a small number of individual files if you experience major difficulties in producing a single file for conversion to PDF. Before converting to PDF you need to ensure that you have incorporated any elements of the thesis created in programmes such as Excel, Access, PowerPoint etc. into the main body of the thesis. If using Microsoft Word to produce your thesis, you should do this by using the Insert>Object, Insert>Picture or Insert>File options rather than by copying and pasting. However, if there are e.g. multimedia elements that you are unable to incorporate into the main body of your thesis it may be possible to upload these as a separate file.

Filenames

You should save the PDF version of your thesis using the following filename format:

year - name - degree.pdf e.g. 2007smithphd.pdf or 2008jonesmphil.pdf

If you need to deposit two files, one complete and one with 3rd party copyright material edited out you should give them different filenames using the following format:

• Public version: year - name - degree.pdf (e.g. 2007smithphd.pdf)
• Full (not for public view) version: year - name - degree internal.pdf (e.g. 2007smithphdinternal.pdf)
• If you need to deposit additional multimedia files that cannot be incorporated into the main PDF file you should use the same file name with the addition of information about the type of media being deposited.e.g.2007smithphd_audio.mpeg

File size

If you are concerned that your PDF file is very large please contact for advice oa.lib@coventry.ac.uk. The online deposit system can cope with very large files being deposited, but from the point of view of people trying to access your thesis it is best if PDF files are kept to a reasonable size.

Depositing associated multimedia files

The main body of your thesis, including appendices, associated images, data, tables etc. must be deposited as a PDF document. However, if your thesis has associated multimedia e.g. sound file or video clips these can be uploaded separately. There are no restrictions on the type of multimedia files that can be uploaded, but no guarantee can be give that such files will continue to be accessible in the future. The relevant software for playing such files will not be provided by the Thesis Service. If you are providing the full text of your thesis on a CD-ROM/memory stick you must include on the disk a separate file that explains what the associated files, i.e. name of file, what type of file it is, what the file consists of, so that when your thesis is made publicly available Library staff know what the files are. If you do not include this we may not be able to upload the files. Note that you should only upload multimedia files where you own the copyright, or where you have cleared any necessary rights.

Creating an edited version of your thesis

If you have been unable to secure all the necessary third party copyright permissions for your thesis you will not be able to make the full version available online. You will still be required to deposit this copy, and it will be held securely. However, you may wish to make an edited version publicly available. If this is the case you should save an additional copy of your thesis, remove the relevant material and insert a place holder at this point in the document, e.g. Figure (Text/Chart/Diagram/image etc.) has been removed due to Copyright restrictions. Remember that you need to deposit both the full and the edited version of your thesis, and that these should be given different filenames.

Searching for Coventry University PhD theses

Electronic theses available in the CU repository are searchable on the University Library catalogue Locate. Printed theses only, including those prior to 2008, can be searched on Locate and requested at the Library Reception Desk.

When theses are submitted, the University's Research Office forwards brief details of the thesis to the British Library Electronic Theses Online Service EThOS.

When searching generally for PhD theses, two useful resources are:

• EThOS - The British Library Electronic Theses Online Service currently has approximately 350,000 records relating to theses awarded by over 120 UK institutions. Around 120,000 of these also provide access to the full text thesis, either via download from the EThOS database or via links to the institution’s own repository. Of the remaining 250,000 records dating back to at least 1800, three quarters are available to be ordered for scanning through the EThOS digitisation-on-demand facility. Please note that some Universities cover the costs of producing a digitisation from a print copy, while others pass the costs on to the requester. To download a thesis or to request a digitisation of a print thesis, you will need to register for an EThOS account - this is free to do.
• DART - DART-Europe is a partnership of research libraries and library consortia who are working together to improve global access to European research theses. DART-Europe is endorsed by LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche), and it is the European Working Group of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD). DART lists theses from over 566 European universities in over 28 EU countries.

To search for theses from other universities you could also try searching their catalogues directly by going through libraries.org: A directory of libraries throughout the world. If you would like to see a thesis from another university you should consider using the Document Supply Service.