Possible to put online a PhD dissertation under a Creative Commons license, as some text is (c) by publishers? It is inevitable that several parts of a PhD dissertation come from published papers. The publishers who claim copyright (or exclusive right to publish) of articles are aware of this, and they allow authors to include their papers in dissertations.

As an example, the following is an excerpt from a typical Springer copyright transfer agreement:


  Author retains the right to use his/her Contribution for his/her further scientific career by including the final published paper in his/her dissertation or doctoral thesis provided acknowledgment is given to the original source of publication.


Furthermore, in the case of monographs the paper contents are often split up to become part of the new text. You do not even use the publisher's PDF, just your produced articles. You sort of include pre-and post-prints.

Now, provided that all the publishers' demands (e.g., acknowledging the source of publication) are met, can one put online a PhD dissertation, which contains both original text and text from copyrighted material, under a Creative Commons license? In particular, the CC-BY license.
If the copyright in the material is held by someone else, you cannot license the entire work CC-BY. The Springer (etc) permission for a doctoral thesis is a specific exception and does not extend to allowing you to relicense the underlying work.