ProQuest Author Dissertations FAQs with the question and answer to Does ProQuest "publish" dissertations?
Question: Does ProQuest "publish" dissertations?
Answer: "Primarily, ProQuest is an archiving and dissemination partner for thousands of institutions worldwide, enabling the works of their graduate students to become part of the larger scholarly record. Authors retain the copyright to their work. ProQuest retains a non-exclusive right to disseminate the dissertation. Because ProQuest assigns ISBNs to dissertations, inclusion in the database could be considered to represent a form of publishing. However, most publishers do not hold this viewpoint, dissemination via ProQuest complements and is in no way a substitute for monograph or scholarly journal publishing."
EXAMPLES (Find policies like this on the publisher websites.)
American Chemical Society’s Policy on Theses and Dissertations → Journal Article Reuse in a Thesis: : "Submission to a Dissertation Distributor: If you plan to submit your thesis to UMI or to another
dissertation distributor, you should not include the unpublished ACS paper in your thesis if the thesis
will be disseminated electronically, until ACS has published your paper. After publication of the paper by
ACS, you may release the entire thesis (not the individual ACS article by itself) for electronic
dissemination through the distributor...."
Frontiers Policies and Publication Ethics →Theses and Dissertations: : "Frontiers allows the inclusion of content which first appeared in an author's thesis so long as this is the only form in which it has appeared, is in line with the author's university policy, and can be accessed online. If the thesis is not archived online, it is considered original, unpublished data and is subject to the unpublished data restrictions of some article types. Inclusion of material from theses or dissertations should be noted in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript and cited accordingly in the reference list."
American Psychological Association (APA) → Adapting a Dissertation or Thesis Into a Journal Article: : "Dissertations or theses are typically required of graduate students. Undergraduate students completing advanced research projects may also write senior theses or similar types of papers. Once completed, the dissertation or thesis is often submitted (with modifications) as a manuscript for publication in a scholarly journal. Thus, the dissertation or thesis often provides the foundation for a new researcher’s body of published work."
Elsevier/Science Direct → How to Write a Journal Article from a Thesis: : "You are almost done with your PhD thesis and want to convert it into a journal article. Or, you’re initiating a career as a journal writer and intend to use your thesis as a starting point for an article. Whatever your situation, turning a thesis into a journal article is a logical step and a process that eventually every researcher completes. But…how to start? The first thing to know about converting a thesis into a journal article is how different they are...."