Thesis Submission

  1. Go to https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/
  2. In the top nav bar, select Submit
  3. Choose the Thesis option
    1. You will be prompted to log in – click the Log in with your CNetID button – Don’t use the login boxes
  4. Fill out the Submission form
    Several fields may not apply to you since the form supports linking to information about published version of thesesand information about funders. Below are the fields you should fill out:

    1. Name: Last Name, First Name
    2. University/Institution: University of Chicago
    3. Division: Social Sciences Division
    4. Department:
      1. CIR Committee on International Relations
      2. MAPSS Masters Program in Social Sciences
      3. MACSS Master of Arts in Computational Social Science
    5. Advisor
    6. Committee Members: You can add one name per entry box.  Use the plus sign to add more entry boxes
    7. Title: Title of your paper
    8. Abstract: Write a short description of your paper
    9. Date: Enter the Year and Month you will graduate using the form yyyy-mm (e.g. for Spring Quarter you would enter 2021-06)
    10. Keyword: Add several keywords that describe the main topics of your paper.  You can add one name per entry box.  Use the plus sign to add more entry boxes
    11. Degree Type: M.A.
    12. Creative Commons License or Copyright Statement: It is helpful to others if you make clear what your intentions are about your copyright.  You can choose between two approaches:  Apply a Creative Commons license to your work or declare standard copyright.  You should fill out one or the other option, not both.  See below for a fuller explanation of which approach is most appropriate for your use case.
    13. Distribution License: You must choose “I Agree” in order to grant the University the non-exclusive right to maintain your thesis in the archive.
    14. Generate a new DOI: Check the box.  This will cause the system to produce a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which acts as a permanent link to your thesis.
  5. Upload your paper
    1. Click the Add New File button. You can do this multiple times if you need to submit more than one document.
      1. Choose a File: Click Chose File and navigate to where your thesis is on your computer and choose Open
      2. Name: You may optionally choose to add a name for your file. Otherwise the default will use the filename.ext
      3. Description: You may add a short description. This is most useful if you need to upload more than one document (e.g. if you submit a thesis and an associated dataset)
      4. Access: You may choose to share your thesis publicly or limit it to campus.  See below for some guidance on factors to consider when making this choice.
      5. Click Upload in order to attach this file to the submission
    2. Click the Submit Button
      1. If you have forgotten one of the required fields, you will get a pop-up asking you to fill it out.
      2. Once your submission is successful you will be taken to a screen thanking you for submitting your work and giving you a URL to your submission. NOTE: Your paper will not be viewable to others until it has been reviewed by an administrator and approved.  You will also receive an email documenting your submission.

Choosing a Copyright Option for your MA Thesis paper

What Copyright Means
By U.S. Law, once you have put your work into fixed form (e.g. composed it and saved or printed the file) you own the copyright to it.  U.S. Copyright law grants copyright holders control over how their work is used.  These rights last for 70 years after the death of the author (after which the work enters the public domain and can be used freely by anyone).  With some exceptions, called Fair Use, this means that others are restricted from doing things such as sharing your work on the web, without your explicit permission.

Benefits and Challenges of Copyright
Copyright is intended to give the author the benefit of profiting from their work and the ability to control its use.  This is an important incentive, for instance, for a novelist who supports themselves through book sales.  At the same time, it prevents a wide variety of uses that could be beneficial, especially in an academic environment.  For instance, if you have ever wondered why the Library hasn’t digitized many of the books or articles you’d like to be able to access online, it is because of copyright restrictions.  So, copyright can have the effect of limiting the use of your work, preventing others from sharing it, or using it in their teaching or research, even if you would be happy for it to be used.

Permitting Use of your Work While Maintaining Control
Creative Commons licenses are a way to tell people what kind of uses you are willing to permit with your copyrighted work.  They come in several flavors from completely open (you can do anything with my work) to a ‘By’ license that requires others to credit you when using your work, to a variety of restrictions such as allowing use for educational purposes, but not allowing commercial use.

Choosing an Access Option for your MA Thesis paper

The Access options (Public or Restricted to Campus) control whether anyone in the world can see your thesis or just people on the campus network. The Access Option is separate from Copyright – you can choose to make your thesis publicly available, but still retain all rights to it.

The advantage of making your paper public is that it gets your ideas into the circulation and increases the likelihood that your research will be cited by others.

Reasons you may want to restrict access to your thesis can be:

  • Future academic publishing options: If you are planning to turn your thesis into an article, you may want to restrict it until after it has been published.  Different fields and publishers have different philosophies about whether they would consider a thesis available in an institutional repository like Knowledge@UChicago as being “previously published”.  You can search journal websites for their policies.
  • Copyrighted, patented, or sensitive material:
    • If there is material in your thesis that you are not the rights holder for, you will need to request permission to reproduce it, or you will need to restrict access to your thesis.
    • If you thesis is based on collaborative work (e.g. part of a grant project with a faculty member), you will need to get permission from the P.I. or faculty advisor before making your thesis publicly available.
    • If your thesis contains sensitive information you should restrict it to campus. Sensitive information can include things such as health or personal information obtained through interviews, culturally sensitive information, commercial or legal information that was shared with you with restrictions.