As you progress through your PhD, you might have the opportunity to publish either on your own or as a co-author with your supervisor or other colleagues. 

This is great as it will make your research visible before you go through the examination process. Your work will undergo peer-review before being published, which means that your work will improved and recognised by researchers in your field before you go to your viva. 

However, this means that you will need to make sure you have the right to use the material in your thesis once it has been published. In traditional publishing processes, you sign a copyright transfer agreement or grant an exclusive license to the publisher. It is important to ensure that you retain sufficient rights to be able to reuse this work. 

If yours work is published Open Access under a CC-BY, or CC-BY-NC license this means you have the right to re-use your work for your thesis. However, in other cases, you will need to ensure with your publisher that you can use the same material in your thesis. It is important to state that the thesis will be available on our institutional repository (SURE). 

The University of Southampton provides a useful guide on publisher's policies about using your own publications in your thesis. 

This list of policies collated by MIT Libraries can also be useful. 

Often you will have to make sure you acknowledge the published version in your thesis. 

As with every other third-party copyright item, it is important to seek relevant permissions.