Research Guides: Copyright and Your Thesis or Dissertation: Introduction

Best practices, not legal advice

This guide's content is reused and adapted from UC Berkley's guide on "Copyright and your Dissertation" : https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/copyright-dissertation

This guide is for informational purposes and should not be construed as legal advice. While the Library cannot provide legal advice, if you are an NJIT graduate student, we'd be delighted to consult with you as you consider copyright issues further in drafting your thesis or dissertation.

If you determine that you will need to request permission for materials included in your thesis or dissertation, consider using this sample permissions request letter.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

If you determine that you will need to request permission for materials included in your thesis or dissertation, consider using this sample permissions request letter.

Sample Permissions Letter

What is this guide for?

Are you writing a thesis or dissertation?

This guide covers questions both about what you put in your work, and what happens when you're finished writing and are preparing to submit your dissertation to NJIT Graduate Studies Office (GSO) for publishing online.
From the beginning of the writing process all the way to submitting and publishing your dissertation, this guide will walk you through addressing copyright and other legal considerations based on the content you're using in your dissertation. It will also help you address related questions once you're finished writing, including considerations about posting (publishing) your dissertation online, and the intellectual property rights you'll walk away with as an author. You can get started by jumping straight to Applying the workflow.

Do you need this guide? Probably!

Are you using materials created by other people in your thesis or dissertation? Perhaps you're using photos, text excerpts, scientific drawings, or diagrams? You might need the authors' permission to include them, because you will be publishing your thesis or dissertation online when you submit it to the NJIT Graduate division. This guide explains when you need permission and how to get it.
Are you using materials from an archive? You might have signed agreements or accepted terms of use that affect what you can publish from those materials. This guide explains how to proceed.
Are you publishing information about particular living individuals? You might need to consider their privacy rights. This guide will help you address privacy-related questions that affect how you can make your dissertation available.
Once you've finished writing, do you have questions about what you own, and what your rights as an author are? Use this guide.
Do you have questions about whether to embargo your dissertation if you don't want it read by the public immediately for certain reasons? This guide addresses them.