Your committee chair and professors have published plenty of work, so for no-nonsense advise, discuss how you should tackle publishing & copyrighting your work.
Below is an example of the options you will need to select for your manuscript.
Publishing Settings & Copyright:
Publishing Agreement: The traditional publishing agreement grants non-exclusive rights of your work to ProQuest. You have the option to delay the release of your work, if necessary.
Search engine access: if you want Google or other search engines to discover your work you can allow access. This will mean your work is more widely available.
File for copyright: ProQuest can file for copyright on your behalf, but this incurs a larger fee than the U.S. Copyright Office charges.
Institutional Repository (IR) Publishing Options:
Include in IR: In most instances, your professors will require that your work can be made available on the Academic Archive. You have the option to release of your work to the Academic Archive.
Institutional Repository Access: Open Access is the most common option. More information can be found at Author Rights.
Creative Commons License: See the Creative Commons page.
Example:
You will submit your manuscript to ProQuest using ETD Administrator, their submission tool.
ProQuest's publishing agreement states that the author is granting non-exclusive rights to ProQuest. The author retains their copyright.
The site does give the option to register your work (through ProQuest) with the U.S. Copyright Office. It may be a easier option, but registering yourself will be cheaper. See Author Rights for more information on registering your work.
You are entitled to 10% royalty for sales of your work.
After you have submitting your work to the ProQuest ETD Administrator tool, the Digital Initiatives Librarian tracks the progress and will contact you if there are any issues. Once you have graduated, the publishing will be finalized and ProQuest will provide West Library with a copy of your work to publish on our institutional repository, the Academic Archive.
Information on the Academic Archive's copyright policy can be found on the Academic Archive Copyright & Citatons page.
You have the option to assign a Creative Commons license to your work in lieu of or addition to registering for copyright. Use the Creative Commons page to pick the appropriate license.
This content is under a Creative Commons License that requires attribution to Texas Wesleyan University.
