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[Automatic publication of the TFG in open access starting June 13, 2023! Summary infographic | Summary video pill]
At Rey Juan Carlos University, students who complete a Final Degree Project (TFG) can decide to publish it in open access in the University’s Open Archive (BURJC Digital).
“The TFG will be deposited in the University’s digital resources platform for preservation and institutional archiving purposes. The copyright holders may authorize the open publication of the work, provided it does not contain confidential information (existence of confidentiality agreements with companies, possibility of patent generation, etc.). In such cases, the University may request the author to provide an alternative document without the potentially confidential information.”
Framework TFG Regulations, art 4.5 (May 26, 2023)
You can publish the report of your TFG in open access, as well as data and other materials that may be related to it, including computer programs you have created (in this case, publishing it as free software). If you decide to publish your TFG in open access, it will appear as part of the University’s TFG collection.
How to publish your TFG in open access
If you decide to publish the report of your TFG in open access, you will need to follow these steps:
- Check that everything in your report has been created by you, or that you have permission to publish in open access any third-party elements you may have used.
- Choose the distribution license for your report, among those considered open access.
- Mark the report with the chosen license.
- Publish the report in the University’s Open Archive. Since June 13, 2023, this is an automatic process that takes place when uploading the report to the TFG platform.
Let’s look at these steps in more detail.
Verification of ownership and permissions
The content of the TFG report will generally belong to the person who created it. However, sometimes third-party elements are used. Therefore, prior to publication (whether in open access or not), it is important to ensure that all content is yours or that you have permission to publish it under the chosen license.
If elements are found that have been included without permission, it is advisable to remove or replace them before submitting the report, or, if possible, obtain permission from their author to include them. If permission is obtained from the author, they can be included, always acknowledging authorship, properly citing the original work, and, if applicable, mentioning the conditions under which permission was granted.
Special mention should be made of elements with a free license. When this occurs, they can be included in the report, always properly citing the original element and its authorship.
Also, keep in mind that for excerpts from third-party works that should be cited for academic reasons, you may be able to rely on the right of quotation.
The inclusion in one’s own work of excerpts from others’ written, sound, or audiovisual works, as well as individual works of a plastic or figurative photographic nature, is lawful, provided that these are works already disclosed and their inclusion is made by way of quotation or for analysis, commentary, or critical judgment. Such use may only be carried out for teaching or research purposes, to the extent justified by the purpose of such inclusion, and indicating the source and the name of the author of the work used.
Consolidated Text of the Intellectual Property Law, Royal Legislative Decree 1/1996, of April 12 (Article 32: Quotations and reviews and illustration for educational or scientific research purposes, Section 1)
Also keep in mind that there may be academic reasons why it may not be appropriate to include certain third-party works in your report, and there may be conventions on how to include and cite them that you should be aware of. If you have any doubts, consult your TFG supervisor or the person responsible for TFGs in your degree program.
Once you have completed this step, you will have a report ready for publication, as it will include only your own work and work that has permission to be included.
License selection
The next step to publish your TFG in open access will be to choose the license under which you will publish it, among those recognized as “open access” by the University’s Open Publication Council.
The author, by virtue of being the author of the work, originally holds all rights to it. Whoever receives the work can only exercise the rights granted by the author. Whoever receives the work cannot reproduce it, redistribute it, include it in a compilation, or create a derivative work (such as an update or a translation), for example, unless they obtain permission from the author.
In the case of open access publication, the license is the text that indicates what permissions you are granting to whoever receives your work, automatically and without them having to ask for specific permission. In general, these permissions will include those detailed in the most common definitions of open access publication. For example, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access states that for a work to be considered published in open access:
“The author(s) […] must guarantee the free, irrevocable, and worldwide right to access the work, and license to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and publicly display it, and to make and distribute derivative works […]"
Berlin Declaration on Open Access, October 22, 2003
URJC Open Publication Council has recognized the following as open access licenses (which comply with the most common definitions of open access):
- Creative Commons Attribution. In summary, this license allows sharing (copying and redistributing the work in any medium and format) and adapting (remixing, transforming, and building upon the material for any purpose, even commercially), provided that proper attribution is given (credit is given appropriately, including a link to the license, and indicating if changes were made to the work).
- Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. In summary, this license allows the same as the above, with the same attribution condition, but also including the “ShareAlike” condition (if you remix, transform, or create from the work, you must distribute the new work under the same original license).
In other words, whoever receives a work with a “CC Attribution” license can create derivative works and distribute them with any license they choose, including traditional “all rights reserved” licenses, whereas if they receive it with “CC Attribution-ShareAlike” they can also create derivative works, but can only distribute them under the “CC Attribution-ShareAlike” license. In other respects, both licenses work the same way (in both cases the works can be copied and redistributed, for example). In both cases, the authorship of the original work must be acknowledged.
Once you have chosen the license, you will have what you need to move on to the next step.
Marking with the chosen license
Once we know which license we are going to use, we need to mark the report with that license. To do this, we will include in the report text similar to this:
©2021 Autora Mengánez Zutánez
Some rights reserved
This document is distributed under the
“Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International” license of Creative Commons,
available at
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.es
Normally, this text is placed on one of the first pages of the report, in the same place where books usually display the copyright notice and “All rights reserved”. The year is the year of publication, and “Autora Mengánez Zutánez” would be the name of the person who is the author of the report (and of the TFG). Naturally, the license reference will be to the one chosen in the previous step.
It is recommended that the report deposited in the TFG platform (usually in PDF format) already be marked in this way.
And with this we will be ready for the final step.
Publication
The process ends with the publication of the report. Since June 12, 2023, the TFG platform is automatically connected to the University’s Open Archive. Therefore, when depositing the report in the TFG platform, the chosen license will be indicated via a form, and the deposit in the Open Archive will be carried out automatically, with that license, once the TFG has been positively evaluated.
What happens next
Publication in the open archive will provide a unique address (“handle”, which is a unique identifier, usually represented by a URL or hyperlink) for the report, which will be preserved by the University Library. In addition, this address, along with the report’s metadata (title, authorship, abstract, etc.), will be indexed in electronic bibliographic indexes, so it can be located by bibliographic search engines, as well as general search engines.
With this, the TFG report (and the materials deposited with it) will become part of the universal knowledge published in open access, and will be available to all of humanity.