Legal requirements
The publication of the cumulative dissertation is regulated in the Doctoral Regulations (opens in new tab) (9th amendment), which came into force on 27 February 2024:
- Section 9 para. 4 and 5
- Section 19 para. 4
- Section 20 para. 5
- Section 21 para. 3
In addition, each faculty has special provisions that determine whether and under what conditions this type of dissertation is permitted. If you are unsure, please contact your department or the Department of Higher Education and University Law. Further information can also be found on this overview page: Doctoral studies at TU Darmstadt
Recommended structure
For cumulative dissertations, it is recommended to list the included articles at the beginning (similar to a list of publications) and to attach a preliminary sheet with the bibliographic information (“how to cite”) and the licence information to each publication. You can view an example from TUprints here.
To avoid formatting problems with the template (especially in Word), the publications of the cumulative dissertation can be included in the appendix. You can merge several PDF documents with Adobe Acrobat Pro or use free tools such as PDF24 Creator. The pdfpages package is suitable for LaTeX.
Do not insert the already published articles as images, otherwise they will no longer be machine-readable.
Licensing
Before you summarise the individual publications into a dissertation, the following aspects must be checked:
- Rights: Have the exclusive rights of use been transferred to the publisher?
- Version: Which full-text version may be used?
- Publisher's requirements: Are there any requirements as to how the article must be labelled or linked?
- Licence for the cumulative work: Is it possible to issue a CC licence?
If the dissertation only contains open access publications with CC licences, the publisher's version can be included in the dissertation without restrictions. This final version in the publisher's layout is also called the “Version of Record” (VoR).
Otherwise, the conditions must be checked. In most cases, publishers allow the use of the publisher's version for the dissertation. If not, the post-print (accepted manuscript after peer review with all revisions, but without the publisher's layout) can usually be used. Special copyright notices from the rights holder may need to be included. On the publisher's article page, there is often a “Permissions” button behind which the conditions for further use are described. Important: As a rule, a publisher's reuse permission does not include the right to grant a CC licence for an article for which the exclusive rights of use have been granted to a publisher or a learned society.
In this Github repository you will find a collection of the publishers' guidelines and standard policies. In almost all cases, you must provide a complete reference and use the DOI to link to the publisher's version. Also check whether the publisher has any special requirements, e.g. a specific copyright notice.
If all publications carry a CC licence , the dissertation can also be published under a free licence. If you have assigned the exclusive rights of use for at least one article to the publisher, the entire cumulative dissertation must be published under copyright.