Congratulations to everyone who’s just finished or anticipates finishing a thesis or dissertation! No doubt you’ve put considerable time and effort into the process, and now, perhaps, you find yourself thinking that you’d like others to read it. If this describes you, IU Libraries would like to help you make your thesis or dissertation open access at no extra cost. The solution is our institutional repository, IUScholarWorks.
Every IU graduate who has completed a thesis or dissertation is welcome to submit the work to the repository using this submission form. Scholarly Communication staff will handle the process from there and contact you when it’s made available. Making your work open access is really as simple as that!
The Benefits of Using IUScholarWorks
There are many benefits to choosing to publish your dissertation open access with IUScholarWorks. Perhaps the greatest advantage is that it’s free for the reader and author. Ordinarily academic publishing pushes its high costs onto libraries and readers, and choosing to go open access switches that cost to the author with an OA publishing fee. This remains true for commercial dissertation repositories. As a service of IU Libraries, with a mission to preserve the intellectual output of the university, IUScholarWorks promises perpetual, open access at no cost to you.
Another benefit is discoverability: the repository provides metadata, keywords, and the full text to search engines like Google Scholar. This makes your work all the easier to find for scholars in your field. If you’re planning on entering academia for your career, you already know the importance of publishing and tracking your citation index. To facilitate this, IUScholarWorks will automatically generate a persistent identifier (PID, like a DOI) for your dissertation that we recommend you use whenever you cite your work or share it on CV service sites like ORCID.
If you’re already talking to a press about publishing your dissertation, IUScholarWorks offers the option to set an embargo on downloads. With the embargo, you can upload the dissertation now, secure your PID, and rest assured that the repository will make your work open access at the date of your choice, whether it’s a few months or a few years from now. Until that time, the title, abstract, and your name will be visible to search engines and users.
IUScholarWorks also has built-in accommodations for clearly displaying open licenses, such as Creative Commons. We strongly recommend CC licenses to clarify which rights have been granted to the reader and which rights the author wishes to retain. For example, you might allow others to store and distribute copies of your dissertation but only for noncommercial purposes.
IUScholarWorks doesn’t require an exclusive license, but as one solution in the publishing ecosystem, what we proudly offer is transparency and perpetual access for the reader. The next time you’re off campus, open a browser tab and see for yourself what the experience is like attempting to access a dissertation on IUScholarWorks and trying to download the same dissertation from a commercial service like ProQuest. Which presents the greater barriers to scholars from other institutions who may wish to read and cite your work?
Other IU Repositories
IUScholarWorks is only one of the university’s repositories. Whatever shape your dissertation has taken, IU Libraries wants to help you make it available in full. If your dissertation includes significant data that you’d like to make open access or video/audio performances, IU provides the DataCore and Media Collections Online repositories, and all of these services can be linked together through PIDs. As straightforward as our submission form is, all of these services exist to serve your specific needs and to help you communicate your research to the world in the most complete and effective way. Feel free to email IUScholarWorks staff to find the solution that works best for your work in order to preserve it in its entirety.
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