Scholars have condemned ¡°unlawful¡± attempts to sell their PhD theses?without permission on Amazon¡¯s Kindle service.

The outcry follows the discovery by academics who took their doctoral studies at Durham University that their PhD dissertations had been scraped from the university¡¯s online thesis repository, where they are freely available, and were being sold as individual titles for as much as ?9.99.

Around 2,000 PhD theses ¨C many of which appeared under the authorship of ¡°Durham Philosophy¡± ¨C had been made available as Kindle e-books, according to Sarah Hughes, vice-chancellor¡¯s research fellow in human geography at Northumbria University.

That someone ¡°should take our work and sell it for profit, in a clear breach of copyright, is both unlawful and untenable¡±, Dr Hughes told?Times Higher Education, adding that her thesis had been available for purchase since October.

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The breach of copyright ¡°raises additional problems¡± for scholars who were often only given permission to use ¡°material that other people hold the copyrights for, eg, images¡­on the condition that they are included in a non-published PhD thesis and not sold for profit¡±.

¡°Public access to academic research is hugely important, and something that drives my own scholarship on migration politics,¡± continued Dr Hughes, who said that ¡°this is why these academic theses are freely available on online, via Durham¡¯s online repository¡±.

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¡°Amazon¡¯s listings have been made without our consent in a clear breach of copyright and with no acknowledgement of authorship.¡±

Many of the offending publications have now been removed by Amazon. It is thought that they were published by a third party.

¡°Our store maintains content guidelines for books, which address content that is illegal or infringing. We remove products that do not adhere to our guidelines and when a concern is raised we promptly investigate it,¡± an Amazon spokeswoman said.

In a statement, Durham University said it was ¡°aware of this issue¡± and ¡°where appropriate we have been filing takedown notices to Amazon to have them removed from the website¡±. It added: ¡°We will continue to do so.¡±

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Several academics whose work was available for sale without their consent managed to see a humorous side of the episode, noting that some theses were fractionally more expensive than others for no apparent reason.

¡°Is it bad that I¡¯m secretly chuffed that mine is being sold for 5p more than yours?¡±??a Northumbria colleague of Dr Hughes.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com