In partnership with the Copyright Office and the Library of Congress, UMI is able to provide both a microfiche and a digital copy of your dissertation with the registration form. Submitting dissertations in digital format allows you to meet the legal requirements in an efficient manner, and enables the Library of Congress to make your dissertation readily available to researchers. Consult with your faculty advisor and your graduate dean if you have any unusual complications in claiming ownership to your dissertation s copyright. A professor who actually contributed to copyrightable elements of your dissertation might actually be deemed a co-owner of your work. Some funding grants may specify the terms of ownership of resulting works.
Some policies specify that the university has rights to graduate dissertations and theses.
If you had earlier published portions of the dissertation as an article, for example, you may have assigned the copyright of those portions to the publisher. Carefully review your publishing agreement. Finally, the medium you choose for publication can affect your decision about copyright protection and other complex matters. In particular, if you publish your dissertation on the Internet without restrictions on access, you may clearly hold the copyright, but as a practical matter you will have little or no oversight about the use of your work by others. For most graduate students, widespread access and use of one s dissertation is probably a welcome prospect.