Student Publications

Student Publications Policy

Student Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) issues are dealt with under regulation 28 (https://warwick.ac.uk/services/gov/calendar/section2/regulations/patenting/)

In Regulation 28, it states that all students at the University will assign to the University any creative output created by them jointly with employees and designated others. Any use of equipment and/or facilities owned, used, lent, rented, leased or otherwise provided to the University; and created in any research-based part of a course are covered herein. It also states that the departure of the student from the University does not alter their obligations under the regulation. However, a student owns the copyright in their own work including, for example, the copyright of their thesis or dissertation. Furthermore, where copyright is created jointly (as above) the student will share in that copyright with other creators.

This means it may be possible for university employees to use student-generated material in publications when that student-generated material has been created jointly with university employees. For example, work that is created as part of an MSc dissertation or PhD thesis under supervision of a university employee. However, the student’s permission must be obtained by the University employee if the student’s actual words, visuals, and/or presentation style (i.e. any authored content by the student) are used in the publication, and the student provided full credit within the publication.

Note that if the student’s work is subject to non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) or similar contractual restrictions, then these will supersede the standard University policy and will need to be consulted before publication is made.

Students’ work is most often used in academic publication such as journal papers, conference papers and other commercially available reports. For material generated by students and then used in publication of these types, it is WMG policy that the students are given full credit for any material used. This means that, in practice, the students’ names must be given as joint authors of the work; it is not sufficient to mention the students in acknowledgements. Where the students’ names are placed in the author list is down to a judgement about how much of the students’ material and IPR is used in relation to other persons’ contributions; however, it is considered best practice to place the students’ names first where possible. Similarly, if students publish academic work independently that is based on their MSc dissertation, PhD thesis or other submitted work then the supervisors of the work should also form part of the author list. The same judgement as above about name placement in the list applies.

For other types of published materials, the University Regulation should be consulted.

In all cases, the supervisors or other user of the student’s work must ensure that all IPR and NDA criteria are met.