Short answer: the student holds the copyright, the institution holds a non-exclusive licence granted as a condition of the degree, and the vendor holds only what the contract expressly gives it. Three separate positions, governed by three separate instruments. Procurement papers routinely collapse them into one, and that is where the exposure sits.
The question matters more than it used to, because a thesis now sits on a platform for eighteen months before it reaches a repository. What follows is what each party actually holds, using published institutional wording rather than general assertion.
Who owns the copyright?
The student, in the standard arrangement. MIT’s thesis specifications state the position directly: under the Institute’s Rules and Regulations of the Faculty and its Policies and Procedures, “students retain the copyright to student theses.”
That is worth stating explicitly in your own regulations if it is not already, because two intuitions pull against it. The first is that the institution examined and approved the work, so it must own it. The second is that the work was produced with institutional resources and supervision, so it must be institutional output. Neither converts into ownership of the copyright in the words and images. What examination and approval produce is a degree, not an assignment.
Note the boundary MIT draws in the same passage: copyright covers the intellectual property in the words and images in the thesis. Where a thesis contains patentable subject matter, that sits under a different regime and a different office — MIT directs students to its Technology Licensing Office before submission. A graduate school that treats copyright and invention disclosure as one conversation will get one of them wrong.
What licence does the institution take?
A non-exclusive one, and the wording is worth copying because it is unusually precise. MIT requires the student, as a condition of a degree award, to grant the Institute:
“a nonexclusive, worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free license to exercise any and all rights under copyright, including to reproduce, preserve, distribute and publicly display copies of the thesis, or release the thesis under an open-access license.”
Four words in that sentence do the work.
- Nonexclusive — the author retains the same rights alongside the institution. This is what makes later publication possible.
- Irrevocable — the institution can preserve and provide access indefinitely, which is the whole point of a repository.
- Royalty-free — no payment obligation attaches to preservation or access.
- As a condition of a degree award — the grant is tied to the award rather than to a separate negotiation, which is how institutions avoid a repository full of works they cannot lawfully display.
MIT also requires the licence statement to appear on the title page beneath the copyright notice, alongside the year and the name of the copyright owner, and permits the student to apply a Creative Commons licence on top if they choose.
What does a platform vendor actually get?
Nothing it was not given in writing — and it cannot be given what the institution does not hold.
This is the point most worth pressing in a procurement review. A non-exclusive deposit licence to reproduce, preserve, distribute and publicly display is a licence for the institution’s own archival and access purposes. It is not a right the institution can hand onward to a supplier so that the supplier may reproduce, retain, mine or derive value from the work for its own purposes. If a vendor is to hold any such right, it must be granted expressly, and the grantor has to be someone who actually holds it.
Three clauses to require, in these terms:
- An express statement that no intellectual property in submitted work transfers to the vendor. Silence is not the same as absence; an integration that ingests documents without an IP clause leaves the question to be argued later.
- A licence limited to performing the service. The vendor needs a technical right to store, transmit and display the work in order to function. That right should be described in exactly those terms and should terminate with the agreement.
- A deletion and return obligation at termination. Whatever the vendor holds, it should stop holding it when the contract ends, on a stated timetable, at no charge.
Establish separately what the vendor may do with the text while it holds it. That is a data-processing question rather than a copyright question, and the two are answered in different documents — the distinction between retention and training use is worked through in whether student work is used to train AI models. An institution that has settled ownership and not settled processing has answered half the question.
Do moral rights change the analysis?
In several of the jurisdictions this sector operates across, yes, and they are easy to overlook because they survive everything else.
Moral rights — broadly, the right to be identified as the author and the right to object to derogatory treatment of the work — attach to the author personally. In a number of European legal systems they cannot be assigned away at all, and in others they can only be waived expressly rather than by implication. A copyright licence, however broad, does not by itself dispose of them.
The practical consequence for a platform contract is narrow but real: a service that alters, summarises, republishes or presents a student’s work in a form that misattributes it, or that materially changes it without the author’s involvement, may raise a question that no licence clause answers. Ask the vendor how attribution is preserved through any transformation the product performs, and get the answer in the agreement rather than in a demonstration.
What about material the student did not write?
This is where most real disputes originate, and the rule is the student’s responsibility rather than the institution’s or the vendor’s.
MIT places it plainly: the student is responsible for obtaining permission, where necessary, to include previously published material — most figures, images and excerpts of text created and published by someone else, and potentially the student’s own earlier work. Fair use may apply, and libraries often hold blanket permissions for figures and short excerpts from academic works.
The self-plagiarism trap deserves its own line in your guidance. As MIT notes, a student who has already published part of the thesis as a journal article, and assigned copyright to the publisher as a condition of publication, has rights limited by what the publisher allows. A student can find they need permission to reuse their own chapter. Institutions with an open access policy can materially improve that position, because retained rights under such a policy let authors reuse their published articles in the thesis.
Can publication be delayed?
Yes, through a hold or embargo, and the mechanism should be documented before anyone needs it.
MIT’s published route is instructive for its specificity: hold requests go to the Vice Chancellor or the Technology Licensing Office concurrent with thesis submission, a temporary hold runs up to 90 days, and the Libraries may begin publishing in the repository one week after the later of the transfer deadline or the degree award date. Departments must transfer theses within 30 days from the last day of class.
Two things make that a good model regardless of your own durations. The request is made at submission rather than after publication, and every interval is a stated number rather than a discretion. An embargo process that depends on someone noticing in time is not a process.
Sponsored research adds a further step. MIT’s guidance is that a thesis should only include findings that may be shared publicly, and that where content requires review by an external sponsor or agency, students must allow sufficient time for that review before submission. A platform that supports pre-submission review is useful here only if it can also enforce an access boundary.
The five questions to settle before signature
- Does the agreement state that no IP transfers to the vendor? If not, add it.
- Is the vendor’s licence limited to providing the service, and does it end with the contract?
- What is deleted at termination, on what timetable, and at what cost? It should be zero — an exit charge prices the option to leave, as set out in what an institutional licence should actually buy you.
- How is authorship attribution preserved through anything the product transforms?
- Is the processing question answered separately and in writing? Ownership and permission are different instruments — the full question set is in our procurement question bank.
Where these belong is in the regulations as much as the contract. A thesis IP position that lives only in a supplier agreement is renegotiated every time the supplier changes; one that lives in your degree regulations survives procurement — the drafting components are in what a university AI policy should include.
If you would like to work through how these clauses read against a specific deployment, request an institutional evaluation and we will go through them with your contracts team.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns the copyright in a student’s thesis?
The student, in the standard arrangement. MIT’s specifications state that under its faculty regulations students retain the copyright to student theses. Examination and approval produce a degree, not an assignment.
What licence does the university take?
A nonexclusive, worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to reproduce, preserve, distribute and publicly display the thesis or release it under an open-access licence, granted as a condition of the degree award.
What does “non-exclusive” mean in practice?
The author keeps the same rights alongside the institution. That is what allows a graduate to publish the work later without needing the university’s permission.
Does the vendor acquire any rights by hosting the work?
Only those the contract grants. Hosting is not a grant, and the institution cannot pass on rights it does not itself hold.
Is ownership the same question as AI training use?
No. Copyright determines who holds the rights; the data processing agreement determines what the vendor may do with the text. Settle both, separately and in writing.
Can a student apply a Creative Commons licence?
At MIT, yes — optionally, on top of the institutional licence, with the chosen licence named in the copyright notice on the title page.
What happens to patentable content in a thesis?
It is handled separately. MIT directs students with patentable subject matter to its Technology Licensing Office before submission, because copyright and invention disclosure are different regimes.
Do moral rights survive a copyright licence?
Generally yes. Attribution and integrity rights attach to the author personally, cannot be assigned in several European jurisdictions, and elsewhere are waived only expressly. A broad licence does not dispose of them.
Who clears third-party figures and images?
The student, with library support. Permission is generally required for figures, images and text excerpts created and published by others, subject to fair use and any blanket permissions the library already holds.
Can a student be blocked from reusing their own published article?
Yes, if copyright was assigned to a publisher as a condition of publication. The student’s rights are then limited by what the publisher allows, which is a strong institutional argument for an open access policy that retains rights.
How long can publication be embargoed?
It depends on the institution. MIT operates a temporary hold of up to 90 days, requested from the Vice Chancellor or the Technology Licensing Office concurrent with submission rather than afterwards.
What should the contract say about deletion?
What is deleted, on what timetable, and that it costs nothing. Charging for export or deletion at termination prices the option to leave.
Where should the institutional IP position live?
In the degree regulations, not only in a supplier agreement. A position that lives in a contract has to be renegotiated whenever the supplier changes.