Submitting Your Work to Digital Collections

If you’re planning to include published material (e.g., journal articles) in your dissertation, make sure you have the rights to do so. Here are some recommended steps to ensure that you can share your work with us:

• Check Publisher Agreements: Most publishers require authors to transfer copyright and limit how the work can be shared. Review your publishing contract or the publisher’s self-archiving policy. If permitted, consider uploading the agreement as a restricted-access file with your submission.
• Request Reuse Permissions: If your contract doesn't allow sharing, request permission. Publishers often allow reuse in theses for free. Use tools like RightsLink on the journal’s site or the CCC Marketplace to request permission. Upload granted licenses as private files with your submission.
• Consider Fair Use: You might be able to use excerpts under fair use. Complete a Fair Use Checklist from Columbia University for each excerpted work and upload these privately with your dissertation.
• Connect Published Work in Your Submission: If your submission relates to previous work, include it in the "Related item(s)" field and add citation details in the "Citation information" field.
• Self-Archiving: If self-archiving a previously published work, enter its full citation in the Citation Information section in the submission form, including any required DOI or publisher links.

Helpful tools:

If you are not the sole author of the work you are submitting, you share copyright ownership with your co-authors, and each of you has equal rights to exercise and enforce that copyright. 

Before submitting your work to the OHSU Digital Collections or licensing it for reuse by others, you must obtain permission from all your co-authors. 

To learn more about your rights as a copyright owner under U.S. Copyright Law, please refer to the Copyright Exemptions section in our Copyright Guide. Contact the  Library Copyright Team for any questions.

Yes, when submitting your work to us, it is crucial to remove any Protected Health Information (PHI) or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to protect participant privacy and comply with legal and ethical standards such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). This includes removing any direct identifiers like names, addresses, phone numbers, or medical record numbers, as well as any indirect identifiers that could potentially be used to identify an individual, including signatures. You must ensure the de-identification of information before submitting your work to us.

Choosing a License for Your Work

When submitting your work, you'll select a license that specifies how others can use it. This is separate from the license granted to OHSU.

• Recommended: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) License

• You can also choose other Creative Commons licenses or an "In Copyright" statement.

• If you cannot apply a license (for example, because the copyright is owned by another party) or you do not wish to apply a license, please select No License.

Important Notes:

• Licensing: This does not change ownership of your copyright.

• Public Use: The terms you choose govern public use. Any use beyond those terms requires explicit permission from you.

Example Rights Statement for Electronic Documents

The copyright owner grants permission for downloading or printing the material only for personal or classroom use. Any reproduction, editing, or other use requires the author's express written permission. Except as allowed by fair use (Title 17 Section 107 U.S.C.), no material may be reproduced, republished, posted, or distributed without the author's permission.

For any questions about licensing, please contact the Library Copyright Team.

Helpful Resources:

An embargo is a period during which public access to the full text of a work is restricted. In the OHSU Digital Collections, embargoed works will display only the title, description, and authors. Authors may choose to embargo their work for various reasons, such as:

• They are waiting to publish the work (in whole or in part) in the future.
• The work has already been published (in whole or in part), and the publisher's contract restricts public release. 
• The work contains data protected by a nondisclosure agreement for a specified period, such as personal information, intellectual property, or company secrets. 
• The author(s) are waiting for patent applications to be processed.

Faculty authors can choose to place an embargo on their work when submitting. However, for graduate theses, any embargo must be reviewed and approved by the Graduate School. Embargo periods can range from six months to five years.

If no embargo is needed, the full text will be available to the public immediately.