Hi all, it is usually after you sustained your thesis that you are asked to give your consent to the access of your thesis for inter-library loans, inclusion in ETHOS, etc. but at my Uni they want the form to be completed and submitted to Registry when I submit the soft-bound copies (I suppose just in case I think to relocate to the Caribbean islands once completed).

Now I am in two minds on whether to give access immediately after completion, or after 1-5 years. On the one hand you may want to publish your research before it is made public, but on the other you risk that someone else finds the same documents etc and publish them without acknowledging your work. I already had the experience in the course of the PhD.

I don't know if anyone has some advice to offer on this? My supervisor said that he is not able to do it (for a change!), as there wasn't anything like this when he completed his PhD.

Many thanks in advance!
:-)

Hi Corinne

Can't offer specific advice to you except to say that regulations at my uni have recently changed. Heretofore we had to submit a hardbound copy to the library but a digital copy was optional. I chose not to submit a digital copy of my research masters three years ago. However, this has recently changed. Now the digital copy is mandatory but we can chose to restrict access for the first year, pending possible publication of some or all of the thesis. Thereafter, we can still restrict access but on a year to year basis. Per our library this in line with other unis across the world. If you do intend publishing, your publisher would no doubt want some guarantee that a 'free' copy was not available elsewhere. In relation to this our library advised us that publishers were well aware of etheses repositories and they 'didn't forsee any problems'. Hmmmmmm, we shall see...

Great you're at this stage though :-)

I opted to make my thesis as public as possible. My subject area was never going to 'sell' copies as such. However, the alternative was that my thesis and research was going to sit on a shelf and gather dust if I restricted access. With my group closing down after I left, no-one was going to take the subject up again.

I acknowledge there's a danger of copying or plagerism, hence my predecessor not publicising and I know of one that barred his Uni. from putting his thesis on Ethos. If someone wants to see the library copy, he gives permission to them first. Whilst this is a secure approach to protecting your data, I don't see the point of doing this after all the work I'd put in, for no-one to ever know about a body of research that might just be of use somewhere to someone. It annoyed me this was the probable outcome.

To establish intellectual ownership, I thus opted to publish as much of my data to journal as possible (I also promised the external examiner in my viva that I would do this). If the data is in recognised publications and journals with my name as corresponding author and my thesis is referenced by each paper, no-one else can claim they own the data or claim ownership. If someone does try to significantly plagerise my data and claim it as their own, these journal publications clearly show from date and issue that I made the findings in them first. What looks like my final paper is currently being refereed, giving me a total of ten papers and a book chapter from the PhD work - you could say I produced too much data.

Added bonuses were I also mananged to publish extra data and findings not included in my thesis and also correct one or two statements with extra data, which my primary supervisor asked me to put into the thesis document. This allowed me to tie up a few loose ends that were left dangling once my hardbound thesis was submitted.

When Ethos was established, I also took matters into my own hands and ensured firstly that a PDF version of my thesis was placed on my Uni's Open Repository and that it was that copy the British Library uploaded to Ethos. With the data otherwise published, there was no advantage in hiding the thesis to protect my findings and my wish that the data did not gather dust was also fulfilled.

If you do decide not to publicise, I guess that's your choice. However, do you want all that work never to see the light of day? I would only restrict access if there was value in controlling publication for financial gain and many PhD subjects are so niche, significant income from them is unlikely. I'd be interested if anyone here has actually managed to earn some money from them.

Thank you both. I think that you are right. It is unlikely that I am going to print the thesis straight as it is anyway. I have already published a paper and other two are in the pipeline, so there will be a record of my work anyway. Also, if it is available it is more difficult for anyone to plagiarise and claim that they didn't see it.
I was thinking perhaps to give open access after 1 year may grant me sufficient time to publish another paper, but we shall see.
In the meantime other and more pressing issues need to be sorted (see my other thread).

Thanks a lot once again,

I have a different take on this. My research is niche too, but my thesis is particularly rich in examples. And my external examiner, at my viva, advised me strongly to restrict access to it for the short term. This isn't a permanent thing, but only a short-term thing (for a year or so) to give me a chance to publish first. She has seen other theses like mine be "mined" by other researchers, who publish first. She didn't want this to happen to me.

So my thesis is currently not available to view at my uni. But I will lift the restriction as soon as journal papers in progress get out the other side.

Thanks Bilbo, having the advise of the external would have been very useful, and I feel that asking for the permission form now just undermines the students' right to dispose of their research in the most appropriate way.

As I said I think that restricting the access for a year is wise, and it will probably be what I will do. I am also aware that in my area is very difficult to publish in a good magazine, as there is a lot of competition. If I had the back-up of my sup it would have been different, but as it is now, I think that it is pretty unlikely that I can manage to publish something on a major publication without any support. In my experience, also the most senior academics have their papers read by someone else before they submit it for peer-review.

Again, I am fully aware of the risks of granting full access, but it is a fine balance between getting your work known, at least in thesis form, and ending with a pile of papers getting dust on a shelf. The latter is an equally concerning thought.

Obviously you have a very successful story on many fronts, while I still have a few mile-stones to complete!