Who owns your thesis

This post was first out as tweets from @HydrogeoITB. Who owns your thesis? Guest what: it’s you! Yes! You have full rights on your thesis/any other works you wrote. Thus its dissemination depends on you (and your supervisor/s).

Sand pit (private collection, CC-BY)

Whether you will publish it in journal/conference, in your institutional repository, or in open repository, It’s your call (with off course your supervisor’s). So makes sure you know your rights and limitations. Things to consider:

• Agreement with funder, university IP (intellectual property) rules, CTA (copyright transfer agreement). If CTA exists then you might lost your rights (partly/whole).
• Conversely, Univ should wisely separate which academic output with economic values (eg: patent, brand, industrial design etc) and which doesn’t.
• Check the rules from an open repository, before uploading your doc or data to open repository. Then apply CC-BY to your uploads.

I will write a lot more soon about this. Many Indonesian universities haven’t put an effort to set a proper IP rules.