Services for Seniors: Submission

According to the law (for Italy Law 633/1941, Protezione del diritto d'autore e di altri diritti connessi al suo esercizio), students own the copyright to their theses or dissertations. 

Like in other civil law-based countries, the Italian law in effect for John Cabot University regulates author's rights. It is slightly different than the copyright law, and covers:

• Moral Rights, connected to the author's personality, inextinguishable and not transferable (regarding authorship, work integrity, recall from commerce)
• Economic Rights, transferable and limited in time (regarding reproduction, publication, distribution, translation, public display). The assignment of economic rights depends on you. It can be partial, exclusive or non-exclusive, and requires a written agreement. Caution in transferring these rights is always recommended: you may still need them in the future, for several uses (to deposit your thesis in a repository, publish your work, distribute copies for teaching, create derivative works).

As copyright owner, you must also grant that all the materials included in your thesis are not violating third-party copyrights. However, you may need to include published items like pictures, graphs, or art examples in your thesis. What can you do in such cases? 

• Use materials in the Public Domain
• Ask for permissions
• Include small quotes and low-resolution sounds and images:  Art. 70 of Law 633/1041 provides the right to cite, including small excerpts or low-resolution or "degraded" music and images from copyrighted works, as long as they are properly cited. For a detailed information on this article, in Italian, see the related chapter in the Guida al diritto d'autore edited by Giovanni Ammassa.

• The Guida al diritto d'autore edited by Giovanni Ammassa is a very clear, regularly updated online manual on the Italian law. 
• Tesi di dottorato e diritto d'autore, a document developed by the Open Access Group of the Italian Conference of University Rectors, provides detailed guidelines for the open access publishing of PhD theses and dissertations.
• An unofficial English translation has also been made available by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). 

 You may restrain from open access publishing, or require an embargo, when

• your work contains information that could risk the confidentiality of subjects from whom it was obtained
• your paper is part of a larger research project involving others and should not be publicly accessible yet
• you plan on turning your thesis or dissertation into a book

An embargo temporarily restricts access to the full text of your thesis for a period of three years from the time of submission. All the descriptive information about it, such as the title, subject(s) or abstract, will be visible in our pages and in Worldcat. Only the actual thesis file and accompanying materials will be inaccessible for the established period.

Copyright protection does not require any form of registration; it is effective as soon as your original work is fixed in a tangible medium.

However, to inform people about how they can use your work, you could take advantage of a Creative Commons (CC) license. There are several, from the most restrictive, which only permits sharing, to the most open, which allows creating derivative works.