Copyright
You are the owner of the copyright for your ETD, within the bounds of the WVU Copyright Policy.
You may need permission to include works created by others, such as figures or tables, in your ETD. You may also need permission to include materials you have authored, but when published you transferred the copyright to the publisher or journal.
What does this mean? As Kenneth Crews writes in his informative handbook on copyright
and dissertations:
Your dissertation is protectable. Copyright law protects “original” works that are “fixed” in some medium—for example, written on paper, stored on a computer drive, sculpted in clay, or recorded on tape or other media. You wrote your dissertation using your original words or other expression, and you have “fixed” it in a tangible form. It therefore meets the basic requirements for copyright protection.
Your dissertation is automatically protected. Once an original work is fixed in a tangible form, copyright protection exists automatically. You do not need to register your dissertation with the U.S. Copyright Office or include a copyright notice for it to be protected. Registration and other formalities may be a good idea, but they are not required for copyright protection.
You can decide how to publish your work. Students should consult with their advisors and other university officials about local policies related to depositing dissertations in the university repository and possible “embargoes” or postponements on public release of the dissertation.
When your dissertation is deposited in the university’s research repository, it may later be harvested by ProQuest. ProQuest does not ask you to transfer your copyright as part of this process. Your rights in your work do not change. As long as you hold the copyright, you are generally able to decide how your dissertation may be made available, reworked into a book, or divided into journal articles. As the copyright owner, you get to make those decisions. However, if you transfer your copyright—as some publication agreements require—you may lose some or all of those rights and opportunities.
You can decide to enforce your rights or share them. As the copyright owner, you have the legal right to enforce claims against infringers. At the same time, you also have the privilege of allowing uses. You can grant permission on request, or you can attach a Creative Commons license to your work that permits broad public use.
Read more discussion of these ideas in Kenneth Crews' "Copyright and Your Dissertation or Thesis: Ownership, Fair Use, and Your Rights and Responsibilities".
Copyright Permissions
You generally need to gain permission for wholesale re-use of any material that is copyrighted by someone else. This includes maps, drawings, tables, figures, photographs, sound files, and video clips, among others.
For scholarly works such as articles or books that are published, most often you will have to ask the publisher for permission to re-use materials. We advise that you ask for permission as soon as you put it into your ETD. Obtaining copyright permission can take weeks (sometimes months) so start early.
For items that are in the public domain, licensed for re-use, published Open Access, you do not have to obtain permission.
You do not have to have permission to quote, within the norms of your discipline, from another published work. Although not required by copyright, you should always attribute your source properly.