Phd Thesis Request- Dilemma
Now to answer this properly.
It's interesting the opinions people have on whether to place restrictions on their thesis or not until they publish papers from it. The only reason I could concievably needed to impose restrictions is if commercially sensitive or valuable material was in it. In my case, there was a lot of new science but no clear commercial value at the time and making money out of the knowledge was not really an option.
So rather than let it gather dust and never be seen again, I dumped it in the public domain. In the end, 10 papers (9 to journal, 1 to public domain) and 1 book chapter resulted from it, further verifying the data was mine. The work would otherwise not have been known about.
My thesis had a large amount of original data in it and therefore writing papers either referring to information not readily in the public domain or restricted would have been difficult. Also, if the thesis is publically available either in repository or via sale through say Proquest, you can identify the work as yours if someone tries to plagerise a portion. It will be dated plus you'll have the "original verifiable data" to show it's your work.
A referee in one paper criticised me for referring to theses as source documents due to poor availability. This situation was addressed by placing it in the public domain and later by adding to my former University's electronic repository when it came online.
What happens if you place restrictions on a document, just for another organisation to publish fully in your field before you get the chance or at some point to gain credit for identical work some years later because you restricted?
Can anyone who completed some time ago say in retrospect restriction was advantageous? There are examples where a commercial / high interest case can be made, but for many of us our PhD research in a niche area where the raison d'etre is not yet appreciated.
Ian (Mackem_Beefy)
