One of the many advantages of an eTD system is that it provides an opportunity for you to learn more about publishing and copyright. Learning how to prepare an electronic document—with possibilities for creating a kind of document that would be difficult and expensive, if not altogether impossible, to create in a strictly print format—can be an exciting venture into the future, and the skills acquired in doing so should serve you well, especially if you choose to remain in higher education and continue to produce works of scholarship. In this environment, as both author and user, you will need to become familiar with the rules of copyright that govern how intellectual property is legally protected. There is no better time to start learning about copyright than during the process of preparing a dissertation.

A dissertation, unless access to it is restricted to people affiliated with the student's home institution or to some other limited group of users, is considered a publication under copyright law. Every Penn State dissertation that is deposited with UMI Dissertation Publishing (a Web-based service of ProQuest Information and Learning) without specific restrictions imposed is available for purchase by any member of the public—and thereby becomes "published." Similarly, any dissertation to which people outside a university have access through the university's server connected with the NDLTD system is also considered generally available to the public—and hence "published."

In the traditional print and microfilm environment, this kind of "publication" did not pose any special problems for students wishing to republish parts or all of their dissertations in revised form later because it was not regarded as any threat to the regular commercial marketplace for books and journals.  But the ease and speed of digital communications have affected the perceptions of risk involved for publishers of books and journals, and the online accessibility of eTDs through UMI or NDLTD now has changed the equation of economic calculations for some publishers, while others seem more ready to take whatever risks may ensue from the widespread availability of eTDs.

With regard to a book in the humanities or social sciences based on a dissertation that the author wants to publish with a university press, for example, one press director advises that because "many academic books have very small potential sales and are economically marginal...it is probably wise to assume that by making your dissertation widely available electronically you are somewhat raising the threshold of acceptance for that later book manuscript." Some journal publishers, too, still refuse to consider any manuscripts that are generally accessible over the Internet. But others don't: for instance, Elsevier Science, a major publisher of science journals, believes that "distribution as a dissertation is sufficiently different from publication in a refereed journal to not be of concern"; and Elsevier Science even permits authors who have published articles in their journals to include them later as parts of their dissertations so long as there is not "any commercial sale" of its copyrighted material, proper citation to the journal is given, and a link to the journal's home page is provided.

In this rapidly changing environment for publishing, there is no uniform practice being followed by all publishers, and the only general rule is: don't make assumptions.  If you are interested in publishing an article or a book drawn from your dissertation with a particular journal or scholarly publisher, or a range of journals or publishers in your field, then the safest course to take is to ask what the policy of that journal or publisher is before you decide whether it may be necessary to impose restrictions on the distribution of your eTD. There is a general trend toward more publishers being willing to consider articles and book manuscripts that are connected with eTDs available through UMI or NDLTD, but differences exist between academic fields and even between journals and publishers within a single field. It is also important to bear in mind that the more revision you have done to make the article different from the chapter in the dissertation, or the book different from the whole dissertation, the more likely it is that a publisher will be open to considering your work and less threatened by its prior "publication" as an eTD.