Choosing a Creative Commons licence and copyright statement for your thesis

Choosing a licence for your thesis

PhD students, registered for an Imperial College London degree, are now permitted to choose from any of the Creative Commons Licences when publishing their thesis on Spiral.  

If you don’t want to make a choice, publish your thesis using a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Licence (CC BY-NC).

The following resources will help you select your preferred Creative Commons licence:

Selecting a matching copyright statement for your thesis

College’s Academic and examination regulations require all PhD students to include a copyright statement at the beginning of their thesis. Now that PhD students can publish their thesis under any Creative Commons licence, there are six licence specific copyright statements, one for each Creative Commons licence.

You should select the copyright statement that matches your choice of Creative Commons licence.

For example: if you wish to publish your thesis with an Attribution-ShareAlike Licence then you should pick the copyright statement that includes the wording “Unless otherwise indicated, its contents are licensed under an Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)”.

You should insert the copyright statement at the beginning of the examination copy of your thesis.

See Submission checklist for Imperial College degrees‌ [pdf] 

Licences

Choosing a Creative Commons Licence for your thesis (video)

Choosing a Creative Commons license for your thesis

Choosing a Creative Commons Licence for your thesis can appear complicated. This short video will describe the three steps involved: selecting the right Creative Commons licence for you, adding a matching copyright statement at the front of your thesis and selecting the same licence when you upload the final corrected version to Spiral.