{"id":880,"date":"2013-03-05T11:06:26","date_gmt":"2013-03-04T23:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/?p=880"},"modified":"2013-08-30T15:40:42","modified_gmt":"2013-08-30T03:40:42","slug":"they-still-want-to-publish-your-thesis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/2013\/03\/05\/they-still-want-to-publish-your-thesis\/","title":{"rendered":"They still want to publish your thesis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writing a doctoral or a masters thesis is a huge amount of work and there\u2018s a lot of satisfaction when you come to\u00a0 the end of the process and the thesis is finally printed and bound.\u00a0 According to the University regulations a printed and bound copy of the thesis goes to the Library\u2019s permanent archive and an electronic copy goes into Massey Research Online<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 Until the thesis is printed it has already existed in electronic form for some time \u2013 usually as a Word document that you have slaved over, changed, polished, sent to your supervisor and so on \u2013 but\u00a0 the printed and bound copy is solid, new and exciting.\u00a0 It looks like a book.\u00a0 In fact, it is<\/em> a book.
\n
\nA few years ago we issued a warning about unscrupulous \u201cpublishers\u201d sending emails to former students who had recently completed theses, offering to put them out in book form \u2013 We Want to Publish Your Thesis \u2013 A Warning<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 Well, they haven\u2019t gone away and the latest to pop up is Lambert Academic Publishing, who have been emailing students with offers to \u201cpublish\u201d their work in return for handing over the copyright.<\/p>\n

Now, this might seem like a tempting offer, but there is no benefit in it for you<\/em>.\u00a0 This is a \u201cprint on demand\u201d operation, and it is highly unlikely that even a single copy will be sold.\u00a0 If it is sold, it will be at an inflated price and none of the money will come to you.\u00a0 In future years you could be even be embarrassed\u00a0 to see your work appearing on their website.\u00a0 In the meantime, the electronic copy in Massey Research Online will be doing a much better job of getting your work out there at no cost to your readers.\u00a0 Within a couple of years your thesis will have been downloaded hundreds of times and you can easily provide links to it to prospective employers or research collaborators.\u00a0 You retain the copyright, and the use of social networking \u2013 yes, Twitter and Facebook, not to mention Mendeley, Academia.edu and similar utilities \u2013 can do a much better job of promoting your work than Lambert Academic Publishing or similar outfits.<\/p>\n

If you want to capitalise on the hard work that has gone into your thesis then publishing journal articles is a much better way of going about it \u2013 you may even have been doing this already.\u00a0 In most disciplines it is not usual to publish theses in book form, but in some cases a modified version could be appropriate for general print release.\u00a0 (History and sociology are disciplines where this happens from time to time.)\u00a0 If you want to do this, then you need to find a publisher that already has a good reputation for putting out work in your subject area.\u00a0 You can expect that they will want to make some changes in format and even style, and they will also ensure that there is a market for your work.\u00a0 Anything less than this is just academic spam.<\/p>\n

You can read more about Lambert Academic Publishing here<\/a>\u00a0 and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Bruce White<\/p>\n

Science Librarian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Writing a doctoral or a masters thesis is a huge amount of work and there\u2018s a lot of satisfaction when you come to\u00a0 the end of the process and the thesis is finally printed and bound.\u00a0 According to the University regulations a printed and bound copy of the thesis goes to the Library\u2019s permanent archive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-theses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=880"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1902,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions\/1902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}