Rules and Regulations
The rules and regulations concerning your dissertation explained.
Doctoral regulations
The Board of Leiden University has decided that contribution to the Leiden Repository is obligatory for doctoral candidates from January 1st, 2006 onwards. This has two consequences:
- At least three weeks before the promotion the doctoral candidate must supply a digital copy of the dissertation to the Institutional Repository, and
- The candidate is required to sign a non-exclusive licence, which allows the University Library to include the dissertation in the Repository, and to provide online access and long-term archiving. On complying the doctoral candidate receives a € 500,- compensation.
Exchange agreements between university libraries
A second relevant change is the ending of the exchange agreements between university libraries in the Netherlands. These agreements enabled the university libraries to provide each other, without extra costs, with the most recent dissertations. The increasing number of dissertations becoming available online is a factor in ending these agreements.
The exchange agreements lay at the basis of the obligation for the doctoral candidates to provide the University Library with thirty or more copies of their dissertation. Doctoral candidates are now required to deliver no more than four copies of their dissertation to the University Library. The compensation which was given till January 1st 2006 for the high number of copies has been terminated.
Copyright and embargoes
It is possible to request an embargo of 6, 12, 18, or 24 months in those cases where previous arrangements with the publisher make this obligatory. For example when parts of the dissertation have been published as article or the entire dissertation has been published as a book. This embargo period can be stated in the licence (Form VI). In exceptional cases, to be decided by the Doctorate Board, a longer period can be set.
Doctoral candidates are required to find out for themselves if and how long for the embargoes need to be set. To help you with this the University Library has set up a Copyright Information Point where you can find instructions how to figure out your publisher's policy and if the article requires an embargo.
Examples of dissertations that are subject to embargoes are those by R. Ikonomakis and D. Vinkers.