Can I still publish my thesis elsewhere if I publish it "closed access" with ProQuest? My university requires that I upload my PhD thesis to ProQuest. ProQuest charges $95 for &quot;open-access&quot; publishing, while &quot;traditional&quot; publishing is free. I want to confirm my understanding here. &quot;Open access&quot; in this context really just means that ProQuest will make the PDF available in perpetuity for free. However, it does not mean that I cannot host or disseminate my thesis myself or use other open-access services, such as my university's library or arXiv. Does anyone know if this is correct? I’m pro-open access publishing, but I’d like to avoid paying this $95 fee.
Clarifying edit: This is not a duplicate of this question. That question is about the distinction between two different grades of open access publishing. My question is about whether or not I am interpreting a specific (and massive) open-access publisher's policies correctly. I've also edited my title to be more clear.
Here's ProQuest's author rights agreement for the &quot;closed access&quot; option (linked to from here). As you can see, they only ask for non-exclusive publication rights. So yes, using this option would leave you free to disseminate your thesis through other avenues. In my opinion, if you can host your thesis in some kind of stable repository (e.g. one provided by your university library) for free, there's no real reason to pay ProQuest for open access publication. Of course, if you want to, or can get someone else to cover the fee, there's no harm in redundancy. However, as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem to appreciably affect discoverability through search engines.