One common tension in the thesis work is the often unstated conflict between the major professor’s view on ownership versus that of the graduate student. As a matter of fact, the graduate student author generally holds copyright on the words and figures in the thesis; the major professor is generally viewed as owning the data and having rights to senior authorship on the resultant publications. However there are many complexities involved and any real understanding of the issues (at least in the biosciences) must be nuanced.
From my viewpoint, the stumbling block often really lies with the question of who has the right to pursue future follow-on research resulting from the thesis (the graduate student or the major professor). The newly minted Ph.D. understandably feels that she or he has done the experiments, has become the world’s expert on that small area of science , has just completed a tome (i.e. the thesis) on the subject and therefore has the rights to the future research based on the thesis findings.
However, in a typical NIH-funded lab, in my opinion, the PI owns the actual raw data (not the graduate student) and it is generally assumed that the intellectual kernel of the thesis came from the PI (at least as much as from the graduate student). This is less clear in the case of non-federally funded research of course.
The key is that the thread of research in the thesis usually exists within the larger context of that of the major professor and his/her laboratory. Thus the argument is made that the follow-on research stays within that larger context of the PI’s lab while the graduate student goes on to different (and hopefully more interesting) projects during the postdoctoral years.
In practice, conflicts have usually been resolved in favor on the major professor as opposed to the graduate student.
So my recommendation is: enjoy the very real ownership of your dissertation itself…and look forward to all the future science you can do, once you are an independent investigator.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 