I'm interested in publishing parts of my PhD thesis in advance and I'm wondering wether or not this will result in problems later on. One of the problems I'm thinking of is that usually the copyright is transferred to the journal/publisher but at our university you are required to publish your thesis online via the library website, which means you have to give them the right to publicize the thesis (which I'm not sure you still can do, even when a slightly modified version of the journal paper is only part of the thesis).


So I guess my question is this:


Is it common practice to publish parts of a PhD thesis in advance and if so does this result in legal problems? What are your experiences?


Somehow related


[Publishing journals articles without transferring copyright.](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/64982/publishing-journals-articles-without-transferring-copyright)



Is it common practice to publish parts of a PhD thesis in advance?
I think a lot of journals will expressly allow this in their copyright policy. I just poked around, and I see for example that the AMS allows this:


[AMS copyright policies](http://www.ams.org/publications/authors/ctp)


and even Elsevier allows this in its journals:


[Elsevier copyright policies](http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/rights)


So you can probably even do this completely legally. I would just check the web site of the particular journal(s) where you are considering submitting articles. And journals will even allow you to modify the copyright agreement in many cases, so you could still ask about this if a journal doesn't specifically address the issue already.


Added later: my last comment was inspired by having read the article ``Do Mathematicians Get the Author Rights They Want?'' by Kristine K. Fowler in:


 [March 2012 issue of the AMS Notices](http://www.ams.org/notices/201203/index.html) (appearing in the left column of the issue web page)


