Publishing from PhD thesis to papers I have a question on publishing papers from my PhD thesis. I found this topic in other answered questions, but never exactly the same (forgive me if I am wrong), and I need some more comments on this.
I wrote my thesis as a collection of few papers, following the model of my research school, but never went on submitting those, for several reasons and for several years. Now I think the right time came, but I am doubtful I can publish the papers in the thesis "as they are", since the thesis is publicly available. Well, to publish papers from thesis chapters is a common procedure in the research school I attended, but normally it is done in the same year, or few years later, while I graduated 6 years ago.
I contacted the editor of the journal I wish to submit one of the papers, asking if I can publish data already presented in my publicly-available-thesis. He replied that data can be reused, provided that it is clearly stated they are not original. Can the text be reused as well? I will make some changes, add comments and update literature reference, but a greta portion of the text will remain the same. Can this be a problem? 
Thank you very much for your answers,
Clelia
You can think of your thesis as a preprint. Thus, you can extract manuscripts from it and publish them. This is essentially how arXiv works.