Copyright of Ph.D. Thesis Submitted to Shodhganga

[Dr. Sangeeta Paliwal]

Dear Friends,

In our University one alumnus Ph.D. scholar is going to publish his/her Ph.D. thesis with a renowned publisher and that scholar requested us to do not upload their Ph.D. Thesis on Shodhganga as he/she has a copyright agreement with the publisher.

Kindly suggest us what we can do in this condition. If anybody has government document regarding this, please share with me.

[Dr. Badan Barman]

Dear Paliwal,

Ask him/her whether he/she need Ph.D. or not? If you are not submitting the thesis to the Shodhganga, then you are violating the clause No. 13.1 i.e.  "Following the successful completion of the evaluation process and before the announcement of the award of the M.Phil./Ph.D. degree(s), the Institution concerned shall submit an electronic copy of the M.Phil. dissertation /Ph. D. thesis to the INFLIBNET, for hosting the same so as to make it accessible to all Institutions/Colleges" of "University Grants Commission (Minimum Standards and Procedure for Award of M.PHIL./PH.D Degrees) Regulations, 2016". Read more about this regulation here.

[Appasaheb Naikal]

Dear Badan,
After reading 13.1 clues from above link I differ your opinion. Because it says "Following the successful completion of the evaluation process and before the announcement of the award of the M.Phil./Ph.D. degree(s), the Institution concerned shall submit an electronic copy of the M.Phil. dissertation /Ph. D. thesis to the INFLIBNET, for hosting the same so as to make it accessible to all Institutions/Colleges."
It doesn't mean that its mandatory to deposit with INFLIBNET and if someone fails to fulfill this, the Ph.D. degree will not be awarded! (correct me if I am wrong).
Universities encourage research scholars to publish Ph.D. thesis chapters in journals. so, in my opinion, depositing with INFLIBNET is one of the mere formality so that the research work can be shared with other people for the reference and learning.
I would like to share my personal experience in this context, I did my MSc – Knowledge management from NTU Singapore. Part of the study I had opted for study with the dissertation. After successful completion of the dissertation, I had to submit my dissertation report to Univeristy library for indexing and archiving into library e-collection. After this, my guide encouraged me to publish my dissertation as a journal article.

Hope this helps.

With best wishes
Appasaheb Naikal

[Dr. Badan Barman]

Dear Naikal,

The degree is generally awarded by the Institute, so it is upto the institute / organization whether they are going to submit the Ph.D. thesis to the Shodhganga or not. However, to have the relaxation from UGC mandatory qualification of NET/SET for the rank of Assistant Professor or other, then institute concerned need to certify that the Ph.D. awarded is as per 2016 regulation. How a institute can certify that if the institute concerned is not following all the clauses mentioned in the regulation.

[Vinita Jain]

As per New rules for Ph.D and M.Phil it is mandatory to upload Ph.D. Thesis on Shodhganga. Before that Scholar cannot publish their work elsewhere.However She can publish some part in journals.

[Siddhartha Shankar Ray]

Dear All,
As I observed during my tenure at ICSSR, they provide funds to publish books and many books so published (& funded) are awarded theses. Publication of a part of (doctoral) research in good journals is an old trend. Many scholars include the reprint(s) with the theses to establish that the work is QUALITY WORK.

On the other hand from the part of the publisher if the work is already in the "PUBLIC DOMAIN" their copyright interest hampers seriously.

Launching a thesis in the Shodhganga has another implication as I think. It is to make sure that work get peer attention so duplication can be avoided and at the same time COPIED or Duplicated works can be traced.

The author can avoid submission of the verbatim copy and should submit a modified version (with a modified title) to the publisher with declaration that it is a modified version (mostly extended version) of the original Thesis entitles such and such. By this way they can avoid the problem. In any way, the proverbial ACKNOWLEDGEMENT page of Thesis are often not included in the published book and some of the proverbial chapters are often modified.

I believe, if the Researchers follow a few subtle steps and do some witty modifications, the complications/ problems can be avoided.

Sincerely,

Siddhartha S. Ray, Calcutta

[Dr. Sangeeta Paliwal]

Dear All,

Thank you very much for the valuable suggestions.