Norwegian Research Information Repository (NVA)

In addition to the general agreement and user terms for NVA, the following guidelines apply at UiB for making material available in NVA:

Editorial responsibility

The University Library has a limited editorial responsibility for content in NVA uploaded by UiB employees and students. Curators at UiB check all documents that are uploaded and make available only those documents where this is permitted. Permissions may include the author's consent, licence terms, UiB's rights retention policy, or the publisher's guidelines. The University Library is not responsible for assessing the quality of the work made available in NVA. The author must take responsibility for that assessment.

Institutional affiliation

Material to be made available by UiB in NVA must be produced by employees, emeriti, PhD candidates or students while affiliated with UiB and credit UiB on the publication, or be connected to a project led by UiB. Master's theses and PhD theses must have been submitted at UiB.

Categories

For some categories in NVA, it will not be possible to upload documents. This applies, among others, to bachelor theses and media contributions. For a full overview please see: https://nva.sikt.no/institution/settings/categories (requires login).

Removal of documents

Authors may withdraw their publications from NVA at any time, unless open access is a requirement to fulfil obligations to funders, authorities, or the institution. If material in NVA is found to contain serious errors, plagiarism or violates copyrights, it will be removed from NVA.

The goal of the University of Bergen is to make scientific publications openly available. For research articles, there is a requirement that a peer-reviewed full-text version is uploaded to NVA. Articles uploaded to NVA are made open access in line with UiB's rights retention policy.

UiB also encourages its employees to make other scholarly publications, such as books, book chapters and conference papers, open access. Such publications will be made open access if they are published under an open licence or the publisher gives permission. If you have obtained permission for open access in a publishing agreement or in communication with the publisher, it is recommended that you upload documentation of this together with the publication in NVA.

For scientific works published open access with an open licence, the published version (VOR) can be uploaded to NVA. For works not published open access, the author's accepted manuscript (AAM) must be uploaded. For unpublished scientific works, the author holds all rights at UiB. Before uploading unpublished works to NVA, you must obtain consent for open access from any co-authors.

The University of Bergen encourages all master students to make their thesis available in NVA.

When you submit your thesis, you choose whether it should be made available in NVA. If you say yes, the thesis is transferred to NVA when the thesis is approved and the deadline for appealing the grade has expired.

You can also choose postponed availability when submitting. Information about the thesis then becomes available in NVA, while the file is closed for 1–5 years (depending on how long you choose to postpone).

You can also choose to make your thesis available at a later stage by sending an email with a signed licence to nva@uib.no.

You can withdraw the thesis from NVA by contacting nva@uib.no.

Rights related to the thesis

You own the rights to your master's thesis and decide whether you want to make it available in NVA. You do not sign away any rights by making the thesis available in NVA. If an external funder has financed the thesis, the thesis must be made available in accordance with the funder’s requirements. 

When reusing others' material, you must ask the creator/rightsholder for permission. This applies, for example, to the use of images, illustrations and graphs in the thesis.

All material in NVA is protected by copyright. Master's theses are by default made available under terms that grant the right to read and to download and copy for private use. If you wish to use a Creative Commons licence, you can contact nva@uib.no. By choosing an open licence, you grant extended reuse rights to others.

When submitting your thesis in Avhandlingsportalen, you must decide whether to make it available in NVA. It is also possible to choose postponed access. With postponed access, information about the thesis is made available in NVA, while the file is closed for a chosen period.

If you said no on submission but wish to make the thesis available later, you can send a signed licence to nva@uib.no. We will then transfer the dissertation and make it available.

Curators at UiB check the rights to articles before the thesis is made available. Unpublished articles are by default not made available, this happens only if you specifically request it. Read more about rights and publishing in Avhandlingsportalen.

• Academic category: the publication must be registered in an academic category in the Norwegian Research Information Repository (NVA). The academic categories are clearly marked and include academic article, academic review article, academic monograph, academic commentary, and academic chapter. Publications registered in other categories in NVA will not be reported.
• The Reporting Instructions: the publication must meet the requirements outlined in the Reporting Instructions. This includes, among other things, that the publication must be an original research publication, have undergone external peer review, and be published in a publication channel (publisher, journal, series/proceedings) that is approved at level 1 or 2 (more information about this under 'Approved Channels at Level 1 and 2').
• Affiliation: for UiB to report a publication, UiB must be credited in the publication. This means the authors must list UiB as their affiliation in the publication (more information under 'Affiliation').
• Uploading of full-text: at UiB, there is a specific requirement for journal articles. Academic articles will not be approved for reporting unless a full-text version of the article has been uploaded to NVA. Authors must therefore ensure that a peer-reviewed full-text version of all academic articles is uploaded to NVA.

The Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers provides an overview of channels approved at level 1 or 2. The register is maintained in collaboration between the Norwegian Publishing Committee (NPU) and the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills (HK-dir).

Here you can submit suggestions for new channels to be approved.

The deadline for submitting suggestions for channels for the current year is November 30.

For questions, contact: publiseringskanaler@hkdir.no

The following principles apply to author affiliations in academic publications:

1. An institution shall be listed as an affiliation in a publication if it has given a necessary or significant contribution to or basis for an author's contribution to the published work.
2. The same author should list the affiliation of other institutions as well if these in each case also meet the requirements of paragraph 1.
3. Employment or supervision of graduate students can be considered a basis for crediting an institution if the requirement of paragraph 1 is met.

To be eligible for reporting, the institution’s name must appear as an affiliation in the publication. This means that the author’s affiliation must at minimum be “University of Bergen.” It is not sufficient to list only a department, centre, or research group.

PhD candidates

For all academic publications that are to be included in a PhD thesis at UiB, UiB must be listed among the author’s affiliations. This requirement also applies to external PhD candidates.