Publish Your Thesis in your University LibraryYour thesis has been successfully defended. What do to next? What about publish your thesis? The information that I am going to share are specific for my university. However, each university follow similar rules and procedure. Therefore, I will encourage you in doing your homework and find the particular specificity for you.
Why publishing your thesis?
Well, you have worked hard for your thesis, why should it become a forgot piece of paper? In addition, the good news is that there is not much work to do. Mainly is about following a procedure. Therefore most of the time you do not have anything to lose.
There may be specific cases where you may not want to publish your work. For example, if you developed your thesis in collaboration with a company, your external supervisor may prefer to keep the information. Maybe you deal with sensible data or company privileged information. In these cases, you may want to share your intention with both your internal and external supervisor. An open discussion may avoid unpleasant conversations.
How to publish your thesis?
Check with your library the specifics, most of the time is about just editing your front page and fill a couple of forms. For example these are the requirements in the library of Tilburg University:
- The thesis must have a cover page, title page and a table of contents
- The title page must contains the following information:
- title (and possible subtitle)
- full initials/first name, surname and (ANR) student’s registration number
- date and year of graduation
- name of graduation department
- supervisor(s) full initials and surname
- faculty name
- The pages of your thesis must be numbered
- The thesis that you will submitted must be one single pdf-file
Here you can find a link with more information (Tilburg University specific)
Should you made your thesis public?
This is up to you. By pubic I mean, available in the internet and searchable via google. On the other hand if you decide to keep it private, your work will be accessible via the university library. Each library has an internal search facility for accessing there databases. Most of the time they can be accessed only via VPN or physically at the library itself.
Here you can find a link to the thesis catalog for my university.
Publish your master #thesis using your #university #Library. Is free and will take #less then one hour!
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In summary
Publish your thesis is at almost zero work and there is a chance that it will be used by some of your present or future fellow students. Therefore you do not have much to lose and is mainly an upside.
In case you want to do a bit more these are a couple article that will help you:
- What will happen to your thesis and what you can do for influencing its visibility
- Consider publishing your thesis Open access for extra visibility
- Consider transforming your thesis in a scientific publication (Extra work will be needed)
This article (Publish Your Thesis in your University Library) is part of the miniseries on how to do a good thesis, you can see the full list of posts at the following link:
How to Do a Good Thesis: the Miniseries
