Licence, embargo and open access

In accordance with the PhD regulations (Article 4.7, paragraph 3), every thesis is made publicly available via the University of Groningen’s Research Portal. To this end, you must complete a licence agreement granting the University of Groningen permission to publish the thesis via the University of Groningen Research Portal. There are several options regarding publication. Below are a number of options.  

If you hold the copyright to all the material included in your thesis, you can have the digital version of your thesis included in the RUG Research Portal as open access. Once it has been included, you will receive a URL that you can use to link to your thesis.
You can skip points 1 to 3 in the licence form and sign it straight away.

If you plan to publish one or more chapters as articles, it is advisable to wait a little longer before making the digital version of your thesis publicly available. These are often chapters of the thesis with the status ‘Submitted’, ‘In preparation’ or ‘Under review’.

Submit the digital version to the library and request an embargo period. You can indicate this in point 1 on the licence form. 

If a chapter from your thesis has already been published as an article, you may have transferred the copyright to the publisher. In that case, please consult the contract with the publisher to check whether it contains any provisions regarding the reuse of material for the purposes of a thesis and its publication.

If the contract does not specify this, please consult the Open Policy Finder.

If a chapter from your thesis has already been published in an Open Access journal, no embargo is required on that chapter, and possibly not on the entire thesis either.
Under point 2 in the licence form, you can indicate which option applies.

If a commercial edition of your thesis is to be published, discuss an embargo period with your publisher. Almost all publishers are aware of the requirement to publish a digital version of the thesis in a university repository.You can agree to a embargo period of, for example, 6–12 months before your dissertation is made public. This embargo period can also be longer or shorter. 

Please state this in a note on the licence agreement. You can upload the publishing agreement as an attachment via Hora Finita.

When uploading your thesis via Hora Finita, you must also submit a signed licence agreement.
It is possible to state in this agreement that material in the thesis has been submitted for publication, or is in preparation for publication, and therefore cannot be published as open access. In that case, the full thesis will be subject to a one-year embargo.

May I replace a chapter of my thesis with the publisher’s version of a peer-reviewed article, once the entire thesis has been approved and submitted to the library?

No, that is not permitted.

The thesis is a final publication. It may therefore differ from an article to be published separately.

This difference is normal, as most theses consist of a combination of published articles, submitted articles and articles still in preparation. During the editing process of a journal article, the article will change compared to the chapter previously written in the thesis.

Including a publisher’s version of the article in the thesis may therefore mean that you alter the approved content of your thesis. This is not desirable. In almost all cases, we therefore do not include the published article in the thesis on the research repository.

Sometimes an (open access) journal requires that a permanent embargo be placed on the accepted version of the article, and that only the published version be made available in the archive. This means that an embargo will be placed on the entire thesis.

In such a situation, adding the published version of the thesis, or including the article’s DOI, is an option.

• Copyrighted images

If you wish to use copyrighted images, you will need to request permission in advance.
However, this is not necessary if these images have been made available under a licence that permits reuse (usually a CC licence). Only in that case is it not necessary to request permission in advance.
You must, however, provide a proper source citation; preferably, state which CC licence the image is licensed under.

• Homemade images

There is no single, general answer regarding the use of photographs you have taken of museum objects. 

- Museums may have their own rules, and these rules may also vary from one collection to another. 
- Sometimes photography is not permitted at all in a museum. 
- Sometimes photography is permitted, but the photos may only be used for personal purposes, in which case they cannot be included in a thesis that will be made publicly available.

Otherwise, please state in the licence form:

With regard to the material in chapter(s) ________, he/she does not hold (all) intellectual property rights and/or copyright. For this material, he/she has the full consent of the rights holder to grant this licence to the University of Groningen. The text or content of these chapters clearly indicates which material is involved and its source.

For enquiries regarding copyright:

Please contact the Copyright Information Point.

In some cases, there are special agreements with the publisher, or there are patent issues which make it desirable and/or necessary to impose an initial one-year embargo on the entire thesis, commencing on the date of the PhD defence. This embargo expires automatically. 

If agreements with a publisher require an extension of this embargo beyond the first year, please email us at dissertations rug.nl.
You can indicate this in point 3 of the licence form. 

Do you have any questions about patents? If so, please contact the University of Groningen’s IP & Business Development Team (ip-info rug.nl).

Due to a publisher's embargo (copyright), the entire thesis will be placed under embargo for one year. Since January 2026, due to budget cuts and staff shortages, we have stopped dividing theses into individual chapters.

This means that if one chapter is not allowed to be open access, the entire thesis will be placed under embargo.

In some cases, it may be desirable to agree to place the thesis under embargo for longer than one year following the date of the PhD ceremony. In such cases, the Rector Magnificus of the University of Groningen will determine the duration of the embargo at his or her discretion. In doing so, he or she will take into account any agreements made with the publisher and any explanations provided by the PhD candidate.

The PhD candidate must submit a written request, with an explanation, addressed to the Rector Magnificus of the University of Groningen. The request is processed by the University Library and must be emailed to dissertations rug.nl.

Would you like to find out more about publishing dissertations on the website. Or send them to dissertations rug.nl.