Publication of the doctoral thesis in open access

At Rey Juan Carlos University, theses presented at the International Doctoral School must be published in open access in the University’s Open Archive (BURJC Digital):

“According to Royal Decree 576/2023, once the doctoral thesis has been approved (i.e., defended and favorably evaluated), the university will take care of archiving the doctoral thesis in open electronic format in the institutional repository of the URJC. This implies the open access publication of the doctoral thesis”* Art. 35, Regulations of Doctoral Studies of the URJC, approved by the Governing Council on July 19, 2024

In addition to publishing your doctoral thesis in open access, you can also publish data and other materials related to it, including computer programs you have created (in this case, publishing them as free software). Once it has been published in open access, your thesis will appear as part of the University’s thesis collection.

How to publish your thesis in open access

To publish your thesis in open access, you will need to follow these steps:

  • Check that everything in your thesis has been done by you, or that you have permission to publish third-party elements that you may have used.
  • Choose the distribution license for your thesis, among those considered open access.
  • Mark your thesis with the chosen license.

In this way, when your thesis is deposited in the University’s Open Archive, it will be published in open access with the license you have chosen.

Let’s take a closer look at these steps.

Checking ownership and permissions

The content of your thesis will generally be yours. However, sometimes third-party elements are used. Therefore, as a prior step to publishing your thesis (whether it is to be published in open access or not), it is essential to ensure that all content is yours or that you have permission to publish it with the chosen license.

If you detect elements that have been included without permission, it is convenient to remove them or replace them before submitting your thesis, or, if possible, obtain permission from the author to include them. If you obtain permission from the author, you can include them, always mentioning the authorship, citing the original work, and if applicable, mentioning the conditions under which permission was obtained.

Special mention should be made of elements with a free license. When this occurs, they can be included in your thesis, always citing the original element and its authorship.

Additionally, keep in mind that for fragments of works that need to be cited for academic reasons, you may be able to take advantage of the right to quote.

“It is lawful to include in one’s own work fragments of other works of a written, sound, or audiovisual nature, as well as isolated works of a plastic or photographic figurative nature, as long as they are already published and their inclusion is made for quotation or analysis purposes.”

Consolidated Text of the Intellectual Property Law, Royal Decree-Law 1/1996, of April 12 (Article 32: Quotations and reviews and illustration for educational or research purposes, Section 1)

Also, keep in mind that there may be academic reasons why it may not be convenient to include certain third-party works in your thesis, and that there may be certain conventions about how to include them and how to cite them that you should know. If you have any doubts, consult with your thesis director or the coordinator of your doctoral program.

When you have finished this step, you will have a thesis that is ready to be published, as it will only include your work and work with permission to be included.

Choosing a license

The next step to publish your thesis in open access is to choose the license under which you will publish it, among those recognized as “open access” by the University’s Open Publication Council.

The person who creates a work, by virtue of creating it, originally has all rights over it. Whoever receives that work can only exercise the rights that the creator has granted them. Whoever receives the work cannot reproduce, redistribute, or include it in a compilation, or create a derivative work (such as an update or translation), for example, unless they obtain permission from the author.

In the case of open access publication, the license is the text that indicates what permissions you are granting to whoever receives your work, automatically and without needing to ask for specific permission. In general, these permissions will include those detailed in the most common definitions of open access publication. For example, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access states that for a work to be considered open access:

“The author(s) […] must guarantee the free, irrevocable, and worldwide right to access the work, and license to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and publicly display it, and to make and distribute derivative works […]''

Berlin Declaration on Open Access, October 22, 2003

The University’s Open Publication Council has recognized the following licenses as open access (which meet the most common definitions of open access):

  • Creative Commons Attribution. In summary, this license allows sharing (copying and redistributing the work in any medium and format), and adapting (remixing, transforming, and building upon the material for any purpose, including commercially) the work, as long as proper attribution is made (credit is given in an appropriate manner, including a link to the license, and indicating if changes were made to the work).
  • Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. In summary, this license allows the same as the previous one, with the same attribution condition, but also including the “ShareAlike” condition (if you remix, transform, or build upon the work, you must distribute the new work under the same original license).

In other words, whoever receives a work with a “CC Attribution” license can create derivative works and distribute them under any license they want, including traditional “all rights reserved” licenses, while if they receive it with a “CC Attribution-ShareAlike” license, they can also create derivative works, but can only distribute them under the same “CC Attribution-ShareAlike” license. In both cases, the original work’s authorship must be recognized.

When you have chosen the license, you will have what you need to move on to the next step.

Marking with the chosen license

Once we know which license we are going to use, we need to mark the thesis with that license. To do this, we will put a text similar to this in the thesis:

©2024 Author Mengánez Zutánez  
Some rights reserved  
This document is distributed under the "Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International" license of Creative Commons, available at  
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.es

Normally, this text is placed on one of the first pages of the thesis, in the same place where the copyright notice and “All rights reserved” are usually seen in books. The year is the year of publication, and “Author Mengánez Zutánez” would be the name of the person authoring the thesis. Naturally, the reference to the license will be to the one chosen in the previous step.

The thesis that is deposited in the Doctoral School, to begin the procedures leading to its presentation (normally in PDF format), should already be marked in this way.

And with this, we will be ready for the final step.

Publication

The process ends with the publication of the thesis. This publication takes place in BURJC Digital, where it is deposited by the International Doctoral School shortly after the thesis has been presented and evaluated positively by the tribunal.

What happens next

The publication in the Open Archive will provide a unique address (“handle”, which is a unique identifier, usually represented by a URL or hyperlink) for the thesis, which will be preserved by the University Library. Additionally, this address, along with the thesis’s metadata (title, authorship, abstract, etc.), will be included in electronic bibliographic indexes, so that it can be located by bibliographic search engines, and also by general search engines.

With this, the thesis (and if applicable, the materials deposited with it) will become part of the universal public knowledge published in open access, and will be available to all humanity.