No secret to the readers of this site that I am a bit of an evangelist for Creative Commons. And those who follow the work of danah boyd know that she filed her dissertation under a creative commons license. Despite the fact that the CC license is easy to use, some institutions have been weary to accept this in lieu of copyright. For those who haven’t filed a dissertation recently, the organization under which you file, ProQuest encourages you to copyright your submission, for which they charge a fee of $65. So, licensing under creative commons would seem to be a better option (especially since you can restrict use to non-commericial).
The hurdle for CC though is often on the Universities side, whether or not the graduate school will allow it. When I filed my dissertation at the University at Albany (in July of 2007), I sort of discretely included a creative commons page, and hoped that no one would notice, hoping to avoid any “official” policy discussions, as I was running up against a deadline and did not have time to make a principled stand. (Side story: I filled the dissertation as movers were packing up our house, and actually had a second set of front matter printed out and ready to swap out in case the CC license didn’t fly with the graduate office.) No one noticed, and thus my dissertation was submitted with a CC license. But, I happen to know someone this semester at Albany who just filled a dissertation. Initially the graduate school rejected the submission for something like “unknown foreign characters” on the title page. I assume they were referring to the CC license images. But after some discussion, the graduate office sent the following in an email:
Good news indeed. Give it up for the University at Albany! (Formerly known as SUNY Albany but that’s a different story all together.) Here’s hoping more schools follow suit.
Why do you consider excluding commercial use a positive? Isn’t it better that more people benefit from your work?
I did a similar thing with my thesis … I added Creative Commons Attribution NC-SA licensing to the title page and just hoped no one at the graduate office queried it. I read the University policy first and got the impression that it would be okay … they require this statement to be signed for the library copy, but it’s just a restatement of existing Australian copyright law.
I also embedded XMP Creative Commons licensing data into the final PDF .. not 100 % sure if I got the format correct though. The Institutional Repository page where it is available also has some ‘default’ rights information but unfortunately does not mention the Creative Commons licensing for the document. I don’t think that this Repository currently provides licensing metadata for various flavours of license, which is a shame, but hopefully it is something that will appear in the future.
In Sweden, we have a long-standing tradition of nailing our dissertations, which means that you literally use a hammer to nail a physical copy of your dissertation to a public notice board at your university, at least three weeks prior to your public defence.
I guess this institution harks back to Luther’s nailing of his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, and the idea, if only symbolically, is to make your dissertation publicly available for scrutiny before you defend it. Recently, however, this tradition has been updated to also include so-called e-nailing at many universities: Doctoral dissertations should now also be made available as downloadable PDF:s from the university website.
This does not rely on CC licencing and you don’t give up your copyright; we’re simply required to make our work publicly available. In practice, however, it means that anyone can download a copy of your dissertation. Of course, this is a great policy, for a number of obvious reasons. I e-nailed my dissertation in early November 2008, and even before the defence three weeks later, I had been contacted by a few scholars in my field who had just happened to stumble upon it online.
I’d love to hear your take on University of Albany leaving the SUNY school system. I taught at Purchase last year. Really enjoyed the people, but I don’t know a single person who liked the system.
I did my doctorate degree at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Since I wanted to take no risks, I made a couple of phone calls/sent out a few e-mails to find out the official university position on this. The first response I got was along the lines of “I have no idea what you are talking about, but would you like to talk to my boss?” I guess my question was a bit out of the ordinary
In the end, I actually found a library representative who gave me the official “go ahead” – no problems after that.