Students in the MD Program who wish to submit any outputs of their Scholarly Projects must first get approval from their mentor before they submit any materials. More information on OHSU Scholarly Projects:
If you are not the sole author of the work you are submitting, you jointly own copyright with your co-authors and you all have equal right to exercise and enforce it.
You must have permission from all your co-authors before submitting your work to the OHSU Digital Collections and before licensing your work for reuse by others.
You can learn more about your rights as a copyright owner under U.S. Copyright Law in the Copyright Fundamentals section of our Copyright Guide.
If you are an OHSU employee and you wish to submit a work that was created as part of your regular work duties, it is considered a work made for hire and OHSU owns the copyright. In a university setting, peer-reviewed articles and other scholarly works are typically not considered works for hire, but any other, non-scholarly works created within the normal scope of your employment would be considered OHSU intellectual property.
Permission must be obtained from OHSU Technology Transfer to both submit OHSU intellectual property to the OHSU Digital Collections and license it for reuse by others.
Please contact the Library Copyright Team if you have any questions about submitting OHSU intellectual property works to the OHSU Digital Collections.
If you are a VA Employee and you wish to submit a work that was created as part of your official work duties, it is considered the intellectual property of the U.S. Government and is in the public domain. Please make sure that your submission form correctly reflects this when you deposit the work.
If you are a VA Employee submitting a work for completion of an OHSU academic program, copyright ownership of the work hinges on whether it would be considered a work-for-hire or scholarly work. If the creation of and contribution to the work is something that falls within the scope of the authors' official work duties, it is a work-for-hire and is therefore in the public domain as a government-produced work. If it was not part of the authors' official duties, then it is a scholarly work and copyright is retained by the author(s).
If you are submitting previously published work of your own, such as journal articles you wish to include in your dissertation or a version of an article you wish to self-archive, you need to confirm that you have the right to include that work in your submission.
Publisher contracts often transfer all copyrights to the publisher in their entirety and specify how and when authors can share their work, including self-archiving in institutional repositories such as the OHSU Digital Collections. Authors should refer to their publishing contract or publisher’s self-archiving policy to confirm their rights. Consider uploading your publisher agreement(s) as private files alongside your submission when you deposit.
The following tools can help you determine whether you have the right to submit your work:
If you determine that your publisher's policy does not permit you to deposit your own previously published work, either in part or in whole, you should attempt to request permission from the publisher to deposit the work in an institutional repository. Publishers will sometimes grant a license to students to republish works as a part of a thesis or dissertation for no fee.
Most published journal articles have links at the journal website for requesting permissions, typically via a service provided by the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) called RightsLink. Alternatively, you can look up previously published works at the CCC Marketplace. If you obtain permission via this route, you can upload a copy of the license(s) as private files alongside your submission when you deposit.
If you are excerpting previously published work in a thesis or dissertation rather than reproducing it in whole, you may be able to claim fair use. Filling out a Fair Use Checklist can help you decide whether the law favors fair use in your situation. Fill out one checklist for each previously published work and upload the completed copies as private files alongside your submission when you deposit your work.
One last option for connecting a submission to previously published works is to enter them as Related Works in the submission form to link them to your work via a DOI and/or citation.
An embargo is a time period in which public access to the full text of a work is restricted. Records for embargoed works in the OHSU Digital Collections will only display the work's title, description, and authors. Embargo periods vary; they can be as short as six months and as long as five years.
Reasons authors choose to embargo their work include:
The process for selecting an embargo depends on your document. For example, setting an embargo on a Faculty Article requires only that the submitter selects the embargo they wish to use while setting an embargo on a Graduate Thesis requires approval of the Graduate School.
If your work does not need to be embargoed, its full text will be made available for public access immediately.
If the work you are submitting to the OHSU Digital Collections reuses the work of others, you will need to indicate the means by which your reuse is permitted under U.S. Copyright Law when you fill out the submission form.
For more information about Creative Commons, Fair Use, Public Domain, and how to obtain permission from copyright owners, see the Copyright Exemptions section of our Copyright Guide.
If you have questions about permissions to reuse the work of others, please contact the Library Copyright Team.
During the submission process, you will be asked to choose a license that specifies how others may use your work. This is separate from the license granted to OHSU.
Authors may select other standard licenses or copyright statements, including other Creative Commons licenses or an In Copyright statement.
The Creative Commons License Chooser can help you select a license.
If you have questions about licensing your work, please contact the Library Copyright Team.
Rights Statement for Electronic Documents
The right to download or print any of the pages of these theses (Material) is granted by the copyright owner only for personal or classroom use. The author retains all proprietary rights, including copyright ownership. Any reproduction or editing or other use of this Material by any means requires the express written permission of the copyright owner.
Except as provided above, or any use beyond what is allowed by fair use (Title 17 Section 107 U.S.C.), you may not reproduce, republish, post, transmit or distribute any Material from this web site in any physical or digital form without the permission of the copyright owner of the Material.
Inquiries regarding any further use of these materials should be addressed to:ethesis@ohsu.edu.