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 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.