A friendly advice

I’m not able to answer your first question, but you should ask Joe Hall.

A CC license shouldn’t affect one’s book publishing contract. The author does not need to make the book itself CC just because the dissertation was CC. The author doesn’t need to make a CC dissertation publicly available. And an author probably shouldn’t allow commercial reproductions of their dissertation without permission so they’re the only one who can turn it into a book.

That said, I am currently using my dissertation as the core of my first book. I’m working with Yale Press who has been wholly supportive. They will even CC my book (and make it available for public download).

Thanks for posting this. I’ve got 2 questions:

- What did Berkeley and UMI/Proquest tell you about which publishing options to choose (i.e. Open Access or Traditional Access) when applying a Creative Commons copyright page? I’ve had some discussions with my graduate school’s relevant administrators, and they didn’t seem to know whether UMI/Proquest would accept a dissertation for traditional-access publication with a CC license.

- Have you read anything about the various career implications across different academic fields of CC-licensing one’s dissertation? I’m mindful of the earlier commentor’s point about humanities dissertations often being the core of one’s first book.

(1) on what grounds would a University not allow you as the author and hence (correct my if I’m wrong) owner of the copyrights to choose how to deal with your rights? CC is a licensing scheme, that means it does not override copyright. I can only think of one answer which would be that the University wants to claim all the rights on the thesis — that would be outrageous and I would call it piracy.

(2) why would publishing your original text under a CC license impede your possibility of publishing as a book? One publisher in the UK has just made the move to publish academic books and set them online under a CC license! That’s the way publishing will be going, since what you need as an academic is not the royalties (forget the stories of making money from a book!), what you need is exposure and attention and being read, cited, translated. That’s so much easier with CC.

And always remember: CC adds certain permissions (and obligations) for re-use while keeping the main requirement of copyright: to recognize you as the author. But you can allow any kind of re-use — under the condition of “non-commercial” and/or “share-alike” if you wish. And you can prohibit derivative works with the “non-deriv” clause. But that stops translations, too. Still, the normal copyright exceptions (or “fair use”) are valid, so you are allowed to cite even from an ND-licensed text.

I’ve intentionally not registered the copyright. No US-based company is going to publish it for-profit against my will and I have no intention of going after any non-profit based usage. I also think that registering copyright is counter-productive when you’re talking about CC so it was a conscious choice.

Monica’s right, though, that if you’re looking for an academic career along conventional lines, the thesis/diss-to-monograph transition is one that could be severely hampered by going CC. That $60 monograph might sell about 100 copies, but until the publication requirements of academia change, having it in print matters.