Making Dutch dissertations as widely available as possible demands a number of measures from the legal point of view.
- Individual university institutions need to make arrangements with their PhD candidates in the form of a licence.
- PhD candidates need to take decisions that are relevant to the inclusion of their dissertation in an Institutional Repository (IR) and its ultimate use.
The Legal Toolkit comprises practical information for:
- The institution
The arrangements made between each institution and its PhD candidates are set out in a licence. This naturally needs to be complete and correct. The Legal Toolkit provides the necessary guidelines.
- The PhD candidate
There are a number of points in the run-up to the completion of a PhD at which such decisions need to be taken. The Legal Toolkit lists the points when a toolkit can help, suggestions that can help take the right decisions, a range of ways to formulate various solutions, and recommendations for the most practical choices.
The toolkit clarifies the legal relationship between the institution, its authors, and the users of its repository.
>> To the Legal Toolkit (in Dutch)
To ensure that inclusion of a work in an institutional repository takes place smoothly, it is important to realise that some measures already need to be taken at an early stage in the PhD programme. This specifically concerns measures regarding the transfer of copyright to the publishers of scientific/scholarly periodicals.
The Legal Toolkit was developed by Leiden University on behalf of SURFfoundation as part of the DARE “Promise of Science” project. Doing so involved analysing and comparing a number of existing e-depot licences. Although the Promise of Science project focuses specifically on the acquisition of dissertations, many elements and proposals in the toolkit are also relevant and applicable to the acquisition of publications in general.
See also: SURF Copyright toolbox. The Copyright Toolbox clarifies the relationship between the author, the publisher, and the user.