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Scholarly Communication

This guide will help you understand what is included under the umbrella of “scholarly communications” and how it affects you.

Published Materials

Typically, when your article or manuscript is accepted for publication, you are asked to sign an agreement that signs your rights to the publisher, meaning you are no longer the copyright holder of your work.

This guide on Author Rights from Arizona State University provides a helpful overview of author rights in publications and what you can do to retain some rights of your work.

Science Commons: Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine
The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine will help you generate a PDF form that you can attach to a journal publisher's copyright agreement to ensure that you retain certain rights.

Dissertations and Theses

You should familiarize yourself with the basics of copyright law and understand its implications before you begin your dissertation or thesis and especially before you submit your dissertation or thesis online.

CU requires electronic submission for all master’s theses, licentiate theses, doctoral dissertations, doctoral treatises, and doctoral evidence-based projects, which requires that you provide consent as the copyright holder.

What rights do you grant CU when you submit your dissertation?

  • You grant The Catholic University of America (“Institution”), your academic department (“Department”), and Digital Scholarship at Catholic University (“Repository”) the non-exclusive right to reproduce and/or distribute the doctoral submission (including the metadata and abstract) to students, faculty, staff, and walk-in users of Catholic University libraries, and those libraries of the Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC), in any format or medium, for non-commercial, research, educational, or related academic purposes only.

  • You authorize The Catholic University of America to allow Catholic University community users of the repository to distribute your doctoral submission (including the metadata and abstract) in any format or medium, for Catholic University internal, non-commercial, research, educational, or related academic purposes only.

  • You authorize The Catholic University of America to translate the doctoral submission into any medium or format and keep more than one copy for the purposes of security, back up and long-term preservation of the scholarly record.

Check out the CU copyright FAQs on Doctoral Dissertations and Masters’ Theses.

For more information, visit CU's Dissertations and Theses Research Guide.