Q. When should I seek permission to use third party copyright content in my thesis?

Third party copyright content are materials that are owned by a third party, not by you. For example, this could be an image or a photograph that you cited, or a table or a figure that you adapted. 

As these materials are protected by copyright, sometimes attribution and citation are not enough. Part F, Section 39 of the Intellectual Property Policy requires you to undertake reasonable investigation for potential Third Party Intellectual Property rights (including Copyright, patents, and other rights) required for your research prior to any use of the Intellectual Property, e.g., content that you wish to include in your thesis. 

This requirement applies whether you choose immediate open access or an embargo for your thesis. 

Hence, if you use third party content that is not open access or covered by Creative Commons, you must seek permission from the creator or copyright owner as early as possible to avoid delays in submitting your thesis.

It is crucial to: 

• Obtain written permission from the copyright owner of the third-party material and save these permissions as evidence.
• Keep track of and maintain a record of all third-party copyright content. You can download the WSU Copyright Permission Register for Third Party Content: Materials & Works as a template of registering these materials and keeping track of permissions. 
• Ensure that ethical requirements are met when including certain types of material. For example, ensure that you have obtained informed written consent if using research participants' photographs (e.g., patients), and particularly for the use of images of Indigenous Australians. Ensure that the identify of participants in the research is adequately protected. 

Even if you have obtained and received permissions to reuse and adapt the third party materials (including your own publications) and the publisher has allowed you to use third party content in your thesis for your thesis examination, please note that this is not the same as permission to make the published material available via your thesis in the Research Profiles and Repository. 

If you have included material with third party copyright, you should:

• If you are undertaking a thesis by publication, ensure that the inclusions of publications in the thesis complies with your publisher copyright agreement. Generally this means the post-print (Author Accepted Manuscript) should be used rather than the publisher PDF as it appears in the final published version at the publisher site.
• Provide a link to the publisher's version of the record.
• Alternatively, you can omit third party copyright content from the Research Profiles and Repository version of your thesis and include a notation where the material has been removed and, if possible, a link to an online location for the published material. 
• Provide an embedded link to the publisher's version of the record if you are including publications in your thesis.