According to UCT’s Intellectual Property Policy and student rules, UCT has the non-exclusive, royalty free license to publish masters and doctoral theses and dissertations in its institutional repository, OpenUCT.
UCT assigns the copyright in a Student’s thesis, to the Student author (or in the case of a work of art that is submitted for examination purposes to the IP Creator of the work of art), subject to UCT retaining a royalty-free right to publish a thesis in any form.
The guidelines for student submission highlight the benefits to having your ETD available open access, as well as some information on copyright and licensing. This guide mentions the process to follow for deferred publication to enable a publication in a scholarly journal.
Masters and PhD students do not directly deposit their thesis or dissertation into OpenUCT. They have to submit their electronic version online to the PeopleSoft Student Administration Self-service functionality. Download the student help document for this process. After conferment of degree, the thesis will be automatically uploaded from PeopleSoft into OpenUCT, unless a deferment has been requested. From June 2015 graduation, thesis and dissertation hard copies will no longer be physically housed in UCT Libraries. The electronic version of theses and dissertations will be accessible to the international community.