Electronic thesis and licence agreement

NOTE: As of January 2026, there are (temporarily) two license agreements in circulation and therefore two answers:

If you submitted your dissertation before January 15th 2026 and downloaded the corresponding license agreement, the following applies:

• By completing the license agreement, you give permission to the UG to publish the dissertation via the UG Research Portal.

• Points 2 and 3 in the license agreement are the most important. Here, you specify the exceptions to the open access publishing.

• You need to indicate the chapter numbers you intend to publish at point 2. These often have the status “Submitted”, ”In preparation”, or “Under review”.

• You must indicate the chapter numbers of the published chapters at point 3.

• In principle, you do not need to specify open access articles at point 3.

• During processing, regardless of the content of the license agreement, we always check all chapters to see if an embargo is required.

• If we determine that a published chapter does not need an embargo (anymore), we implement it that way and the responsibility for making this chapter open access passes to the UG.

• If you are publishing a commercial edition of the thesis, please mention this via a note on the license agreement. You can upload the publisher's agreement as an attachment via Hora Finita.

• Point 4 of the license agreement informs you that we initially place a one-year embargo on chapters mentioned in point 2 starting from the promotion date. This embargo expires automatically. If agreements with a publisher require an extension of this embargo after the first year, please email at dissertations rug.nl.

If you submitted your dissertation after January 15th 2026 and downloaded the accompanying license agreement, the following applies:

• By completing the licence agreement, you grant the University of Groningen permission to publish the thesis via the UG Research Portal.

• If you fully agree to the open access (non-exclusive publication) publication of your dissertation, you can skip points 1 through 3 and sign directly.

• If material in your dissertation is not open access, your dissertation will be placed under a provisional embargo for one year. Under points 1 and 2 of the license agreement, you can indicate which applies: Under point 1, indicate that the dissertation contains material that you intend to publish. These are often chapters of the dissertation with the status 'Submitted', 'In preparation', or 'Under review'. Under point 2, indicate that the dissertation contains material that has already been published.

• If you are publishing a commercial edition of the dissertation, please mention this in a note on the license agreement. You can upload the publisher's agreement as an attachment via Hora Finita.

• Point 3 of the license agreement informs you that we initially place a one-year embargo on the complete thesis starting from the promotion date. This embargo expires automatically. If agreements with a publisher require an extension of this embargo after the first year, please email us at dissertations rug.nl.