Sharing your research results

You may always share a link to your research output on platforms like ResearchGate, Academia.edu, or ScholarMate. However, you may share a PDF of your research output only if you are the work’s copyright owner and the work is not limited by contractual agreements (e.g. regarding confidentiality), if you have the owner’s permission, or if a statutory exemption applies (e.g. for personal use or in accordance with the Taverne amendment). In most cases, however, copyright of research papers, reports or books is transferred to the publisher. Therefore, you should check if the publisher’s conditions allow to share your paper or other research output on ResearchGate, Academia.edu or ScholarMate. These conditions might be written down in the Author Rights document. In many cases, publishers allow sharing your paper’s post-print or pre-print version, sometimes after an embargo. On the SHERPA/RoMEO website, you can check if you may share versions of your research paper.

You may also not be allowed to personally share your paper with a colleague by e-mail. If someone requests a PDF of your paper, please verify that you are entitled to do so, or otherwise send the link to your paper on the publisher’s website.

The general rule is that only the copyright owner has the right to express, publish, display, distribute and copy his or her work. As long as WUR or you are the copyright owner, you may share your publications in a repository, such as Research@WUR, or platforms, such as Shareyourpaper.org.

If you published your article closed access in a research journal, you most likely transferred the copyright to the publisher. In that case, you can still share a version of your article in the WUR repository by (a) using the Taverne Amendment and making the final published version of your short scientific works openly available six months after the first online publishing date, regardless of the rights of publishers and / or co-authors or (b) by self-archiving the Author Accepted Manuscript (AMM) when the publisher’s embargo period has expired. Please check in the WUR Journal Broswer if the publisher allows you to deposit the AAM in the WUR repository after the embargo period.

WUR owns the copyright on all conference presentations created by its employees. Only WUR has the exclusive right to reproduce the work, to make the work publicly available or to put a CC-licence on the work.  

WUR owns the copyright on educational materials created by its employees. Copyright on educational materials, such as lecture materials, PowerPoint slide shows, video recordings of lectures, course guides and other educational materials are vested solely in WUR. In short, only WUR has the exclusive right to reproduce the work or to make the work publicly available. For more information see the page Ownership & Licences.

During the paper submission process, you may be asked to transfer your copyright to the publisher. If you must transfer all your rights, it is important to retain the right to publish this article as a chapter in your PhD thesis or the right to use this article in education. If you did not arrange this with the journal during the paper submission process, it will depend on the journal if you are allowed to publish the article as a thesis chapter. Please check the publisher’s copyright statement or the contract you have signed if you may publish the paper in your thesis.

In some cases, you may publish the paper’s post print or pre-print version in your thesis. On the SHERPA/RoMEO website, you can check if you may publish the paper in your PhD thesis.