Copyright and OpenEd@UCL

Copyright is an important aspect of academic work and needs to be considered from an early stage in your planning. This applies to your dissertation or thesis but also any other academic outputs such as journal articles, blog posts, diagrams, and film.

When you post your work on OpenEd @ UCL, the UCL Open Education repository, it will be available to anyone with an Internet connection. In copyright terms you are “communicating your work to the public.” This is a restricted act, which needs the permission of the copyright owner. That’s fine if it’s all your own work, but you must consider whether you have included material by anyone else.

Have you included material by other people in your academic work, such as text, photographs, diagrams, or sound recordings? This is also referred to as “third party material” and unless it is very old, it is likely still to be copyright-protected. Copyright in most materials lasts for the author’s lifetime plus 70 years. For example the author George Orwell died in 1950, which means that his published works will not come out of copyright until January 2021. From that time his published works can be freely reused. 

Seeking permission from a copyright owner can take some time. It is best to start at an early point and to consider any copyright issues as you proceed with your academic work.
 
Try to avoid leaving copyright until the end.

Keep a record of your correspondence with copyright owners, particularly any permissions you receive. Bear in mind that silence from the copyright owners does not imply consent to your request.

Permission from the copyright owner should cover everything you intend to do with your academic work. You should be specific about what you plan to do with your work, such as posting it in OpenEd @ UCL or plans to publish your work in other ways. Otherwise you may find you need to apply for additional permissions later on.

Some material on the internet is already licensed by the copyright owner for others to reuse: 

• Creative Commons licences are the most popular form of licence, see creativecommons.org.
• CC licences offer a wealth of material in different formats which can be reused without cost or permission. 
• You must adhere to the licence terms, which are quite straight-forward. 

They are particularly useful for locating images and photographs which can readily be reused. You can search for licensed material from the CC website and from other popular sites such as Flickr and Google, by applying the appropriate licence filters.

You can also search for openly-licensed images to reuse on the Open Education webpage.

Reusing images often poses more problems than text. In copyright terms an image is a complete “artistic work” so you will be reusing 100% of a copyright protected work. 

This can be harder to defend as “fair dealing” but in some cases you may still be able to rely upon the quotations exception. 

Photographs on the internet often lack information about who created them or who owns the copyright, which increases the danger of infringing copyright inadvertently. 

Searching for images that are covered by a Creative Commons licence is a good solution.

If you need permission to reuse third party content and it proves impossible to identify or locate the copyright owner despite your best efforts, this may be an “orphan work”. 

The UK intellectual Property Office (UK IPO) offers an Orphan works licensing service which allows you to reuse an orphan work for a modest fee. 

You must demonstrate that you have carried out a “diligent search” for the copyright owner. This is worth bearing in mind if the content is crucial to your academic work.

As a UCL student the copyright in your work belongs to you, unless you have assigned it to someone else. The UCL IPR policy contains more detail and can be found on the UCL website. 

If you wish to use your academic material that you have published previously, for example a thesis, you may find you need permission from the publisher. 

Sometimes authors are surprised to find they need permission to reuse their own work but this can arise if you assigned your copyright to a publisher as part of a publishing agreement. 

Before signing a publisher’s contract you should read it carefully and be prepared to negotiate.

Academic work at all levels across UCL may be published in OpenEd @ UCL. Your course tutor will inform you if there is a chance your work will be uploaded to OpenEd @ UCL and you will need to consent to this.

PhD theses are deposited in UCL Discovery, an open access platform.

Publishing in UCL’s open access repositories is beneficial for:

• Making your work more visible to a wider audience.
• Providing a stable platform and URL for your work, so that it is easy to share it with the research community.
• Meeting the open access requirements of funders.

When your academic work is available on the internet, via OpenEd @ UCL or another platform, any unresolved questions around third party copyright may become more of an issue. 

You need to consider carefully each item of third party content before your work is posted online: 

• Do you have permission or a licence to re-use the content? 
• Do you feel confident in relying upon a “fair dealing” exception? 
• Have you acknowledged the author and source? 

There is often an element of judgement and you may need to seek advice from someone else such as your supervisor or the UCL Copyright support team.

When producing work by collaborating with other students, you will need to agree with your group members on copyright and how to share (licence) your work. 

You should be mindful of any personal information you include in your work, especially if you are putting it online, as this will be viewable to anyone with an Internet connection. Personal information can include your name, what course you are on, or other identifying information. If you do not want to publish your name alongside your work, speak to your tutor or supervisor about using a pseudonym instead of your full name.