Publishing Academic Research

If you publish journal articles that contribute to your thesis, the publishing agreement will state how the articles may be included in your thesis.

There are three models of Open Access. The first two allow you to include your publications in your thesis without requesting permission from the publisher.

• Gold Open Access: If you publish in an Open Access journal and retain copyright ownership, you will be able to include the Published Version.
• Green Open Access: Most journals allow you to include the Accepted Version and make it publicly available. If you do this, make sure you include a statement such as "This is the Accepted Version of a paper published in the journal [journal name]. The full reference is [full reference]."
• Hybrid Open Access: This option requires you to pay a publishing fee to the publisher, but the publisher only makes the article publicly available direct from their website.

Thesis authors are routinely contacted by publishers, usually by email, with an offer to publish their thesis. These unsolicited offers are of concern because publishing with these entities may restrict future use of the content in your thesis. Restrictions may result from conditions that you agreed to in the publishing agreement or because journal publishers do not accept material which has already been published.

The websites of these entities are often impressive and give apparent validity. Despite this, publishing quality is frequently substandard and distribution of publications is poor.

If you are considering publishing your thesis, see the Publishing: Books and Book Chapters and Understanding Publishers pages of this LibGuide for more information to assist you with choosing a publisher.

Third party material refers to any material for which you do not own the copyright.

To use third party material in your thesis, you need to have permission from the copyright owner, or be able to rely on provisions in the Copyright Act that allow you to use third party material without permission.

You do not need to seek permission if:

• There is a licence which permits you to use the work in the way you wish to use it e.g. a contract, web site conditions, Creative Commons licence, copyright owner has explicitly waived copyright.
• You are the creator of the work but have signed copyright ownership over to a third party (e.g. a publisher) and you wish to use the work in a way that is permitted in the copyright transfer agreement (also known as a publishing agreement). As an example, the publisher may permit you to load an Accepted Version to your institutional repository.
• Your use is covered under Fair dealing for criticism or review provision of the Copyright Act.
• Your use is covered under Fair dealing for parody & satire provision of the Copyright Act.
• You are including an insubstantial portion.
• Copyright in the work has expired.

JCU Research theses are made available via ResearchOnline@JCU, the University's institutional repository.