Library Services for Undergraduate Research

• Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses (Open Scholarship)
  Start here and choose Restricted (to on campus) or Unrestricted (worldwide) access, and select an embargo if needed. You must consult with your mentor and colleagues before you share group work openly.

Why publish your paper Open Access? Here are a few reasons:

• You can include on your resume with a link to the full-text.
• WU departments, students and researchers in the future will find it convenient to have your senior projects available
• Share what you have learned or created with others, worldwide.

Why not?

• If your work contains data that was collected, processed, or arranged by third parties (whether from within your lab, school, department, or elsewhere)
• If your work contains data that could risk the confidentiality of subjects from whom it was obtained
• If your paper is part of a larger research project involving faculty, graduate students, post-docs, or others and should not be publicly accessible yet

According to WUSTL Intellectual Property Policy, students own copyright on their work. [see sect.3.b.2 and 2.b.3] There is no requirement to register your copyright nor to mark Copyright © and the year on the document. That is entirely up to you.

Especially for open access sharing, you may wish to consider choosing an explicit license which specifies how you want your work to be used, whether you want attribution, etc.  Creative Commons licenses are one way to make your wishes clear.

It is common that research might include pictures, graphs, art examples, or other items which have been published elsewhere. Since you may wish to have your work available in Open Scholarship, you must ensure that you are including materials consistent with the rights of the owners of that work.

Some of your options:

• Explore “fair use.” Permission is not required for fair use of copyrighted materials. The copyright law contains a non-exclusive list of purposes for which the use of a copyrighted work would be considered “fair,” such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research. Determining whether a proposed use is fair is case specific and requires consideration of four specific factors, see Introduction to Fair Use.
• Seek permission and get it in writing; more about obtaining permission.
• Seek alternatives; sometimes you can find an alternative, for example work which is has been shared with a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain. Your subject librarian may be able to help with this search.