How to licence your thesis using Creative Commons

One of the main objectives of PhD thesis (dissertation) is to advance the subject by making a contribution. Traditionally theses have been licensed under the copyright where all rights are reserved. And I also did put “All rights reserved” on the cover page of my thesis when I first drafted it. But just today when I realised that I should replace it by a “Creative Commons” one which could enhance the contributions and the impacts of my thesis.

Therefore I adopted the CC BY-NC-ND licence.  Then others are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work with some conditions.

To do so, I inserted the artwork of the By-NC-ND licence and put the sentence ” This thesis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivs 3.0 Unported License.” with the link to Creative Commons site that explain the licence.

1. Choose a licence you will use for your thesis here

2. Download the button of the licence you here and save the image in the LaTeX script folder of your thesis. I named my image as cc-by-nc-nd.png

3. Put the following LaTeX code on the title page of your thesis

line 06: Place your licence file name. Mine is “cc-by-nc-nd.png”.
line 10: Place the URL link to your licence and its description.

LaTeX code:

%Insert Creative Commons Artwork
\DeclareGraphicsExtensions{.pdf,.png,.jpg}
\begin{center}
\leavevmode
%Insert image file name below "cc-by-nc-nd.png"
\includegraphics[width=1in]{cc-by-nc-nd.png}
\end{center}
\label{fig:cc}
%insert a link to the licence and its description below
\scriptsize{This thesis is licensed under a \href{http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/}{Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivs 3.0 Unported License.}}

4. Finally you will get the following on the title page of your thesis.

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