- Why would I want to deposit my thesis? Answer: Get credit for your work. Demonstrate to potential graduate programs or employers that you have completed a finished research project.
- Why might I be required to deposit my thesis? Answer: If your research is federally funded, you are required to make your results available to the public. This is one way to do it.
- Why is this good for open science? Answer: A lot of research done by students never gets published in journals but often contains useful research results. Posting your work contributes to the pool of knowledge.
- Does this mean I cannot publish the work in the future? Answer: No. Posting the thesis version of your research does NOT count as prior publication for the purposes of submitting to a peer reviewed journal in sociology. (There are a few non-sociology publications that treat public preprints as prior publication, but federal requirements for open access have made this less common. Ask for advice if you are unsure.)
- Won’t this let other people steal my research? Answer: Plagiarism from unpublished research can be a problem. There are tales of people stealing from conference papers or even manuscripts being anonymously peer reviewed for journals. However, posting to a dated permanent archive like this one allows you to document your claim about when your work was done and gives you some recourse if you are plagiarized..
- Won’t this remove my anonymity for peer review? Answer: Possibly, if the reviewer Googles your paper title, which they might do anyway. But there is no ethical obligation not to do conference presentations about work you will be submitting to a journal and no reasonable way to keep non-students’ work in progress anonymous. Most of the protection of peer review is the anonymity of the reviewer. Final publication decisions are made by editors, who always know the name and status of authors.
- Why would I not want to do this? Answer: If the paper is already published or forthcoming in a peer-reviewed journal, or as a book, there may be no need to post to a thesis repository. However, you might wish to post the thesis anyway to permit public access to your work if the journal or book is not open access. If you expect or hope to publish your thesis as a book without substantial revisions, you may wish to consult with publishers about posting it as a thesis as some book publishers may fear that the work being available for free will hurt sales.
- What if my work isn’t good enough for others to read or people criticize it? Answer: If your advisor approved your thesis, it should be good enough for others to read. All academic work is subject to criticism, that is how knowledge progresses.
- Will people who completed their theses before May 2023 be allowed to deposit? Answer: Yes. If your thesis was completed more than a month before the deposit date, we suggest that you add a note to the abstract about when it was completed, as the repository will show the deposit date. When submitting, use the “original publication date” field to list the thesis completion date.
- Are you also accepting PhD dissertations? Answer: No. These are deposited with ProQuest. If you wish to provide more open access to your dissertation, you may also deposit it to other repositories.
What will this involve? Answer: Creating a MINDS@UW account, preparing a PDF of your thesis, filling out and adding a cover page, uploading your thesis to the submission portal. Detailed instructions: Submitting your sociology thesis to MINDS@UW