Dear LIS-LINKers,
There would appear to be a grey area surrounding the legality of quoting from theses. Since the inception of EThOS all of our users submitting a thesis to the library must sign the EThOS copyright statement which says that, “A non-exclusive, non-transferable licence is hereby granted to those using or reproducing, in whole or in part, the material for valid purposes, providing the copyright owners are acknowledged using the normal conventions.”
However, this has now opened up a disparity between recent theses submitted under the EThOS terms (where referencing is expressly allowed) and older theses in our hard copy collection (where referencing is not permitted without the author’s consent). Pre-EThOS, our copyright statement (still to be found in the front of all our theses) stated that it was an infringement of copyright law to photocopy or scan any pages from it without the author’s permission, and that permission must also be sought to use any “quotation from it or information derived from it”. I believe that such statements are common at other university libraries. An academic colleague has challenged this statement in our hard copy theses, insisting that so long as correct referencing is applied then there should be no problem in quoting from them. We would therefore be interested to know:
a) What do other libraries advise their users in relation to quoting from theses in their own collections?
b) Is anyone aware of the legal basis behind inserting such statements at the front of theses i.e. is there a “definitive” legal statement in copyright law supporting the fact that: i) a thesis is an unpublished work, and ii) unpublished works cannot be copied from in any form (photocopying, a fully referenced quote etc.) without express permission from the author?
All information and advice is much appreciated. I will summarise / feedback to the list any advice received.
Thanks and regards,
Graham
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Graham Fennell BA (Hons) MA MCLIP
Subject Librarian for Psychology
University of East London
Library and Learning Services
University House
Water Lane
London E15 4LZ
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Tel: 020 8223 3140
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