From the Daily Californian
By Ian Elwood
Course readers are pushing $200 due to excessive copyright permission fees. Libraries are crippled by the high cost of proprietary databases and restricted access journals. Access to knowledge has increasingly become the turf of corporations seeking to monetize scholarship by restricting informational access.
At UC Berkeley, many students do not think about intellectual property or copyright ownership. Although student work such as a thesis or a dissertation is owned by the student, until recently the boilerplate copyright on a dissertation would default to "all rights reserved." ...
Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig created Creative Commons with the goal of allowing copyright owners to permit new uses of their artistic and academic work....
Two recent Berkeley students to file their dissertations using a Creative Commons license are Joseph Lorenzo Hall and danah boyd. Hall navigated through much bureaucratic red tape, but found that most of his difficulty came from simple formatting issues, not any ideological disagreement by the university. Another School of Information graduate, danah boyd, also filed her dissertation under Creative Commons shortly thereafter....
For those who want to liberate their scholarly publications, an example can be viewed on the website of Joseph Lorenzo Hall and the website of danah boyd.