Where to publish master's thesis (in PDF)?

I have my master thesis in PDF. While the printed original is stored on the faculty where I have studied, the digital version in nowhere published. The free hostings will typically perish after some years, and the payed ones will be removed as soon as you don't pay the next fee.

This thesis is nothing very special (in other case I would be doctor now :) but it was a lot effort anyway and someone else could find this useful.

Where can I publish such resources, so that they will be preserved for future generations? Is there a site specialized in storing such resources, or a sharing community from that it would be copied to many places (interested users), preserving it from disapearing?

lechlukasz

• publishing

Comments

• jcmeloni: Which is your primary goal: *publish*, *preserve*, or both?
• John Lovejoy: Not sure if this is a digital preservation question at all.

Answer by luser droog

Perhaps the best way at present is to arrange to have it snagged by the Wayback Machine (or another archive) from your homepage at your current institution. That way you'll have a more or less permanent URL, as long as the Internet Archive lasts.

If it can be formatted as straight text, one or another usenet group would likely be thrilled to see it (and automatically archive it in numerous usenet archives throughout the world). I've been doing this with little programs and ideas, mainly so I can find my own work again after my computer inevitably dies. :) According to this answer, I'm full of crap here.

I was about to say Google Docs, but I see it's now turned into Google Drive, and that strikes me as a little unstable.

Comments

Answer by Paramaeleon

General rule:

1. Put your publication under an open license.
2. Make it available online. If it is worth it, I suppose net community will start to care for it then.

More specific to your question:

Address yourself to your faculty first. Maybe they run a subject oriented repository in publishing or they know a scientific society which does this for your field of study. If they don’t do, ask your university’s library for it and do not hesitate to continue to your regional library and—if they don’t provide for that—move on to your national library as well. Make sure your thesis is in PDF/A format and be prepared to seperately provide some so called “metadata” for cataloging, mainly

• the full list of contributors,
• the title,
• any alternative titles,
• the abstract,
• some subject keywords,
• the gemporal coverage,
• the dates the thesis was created / started, last modified / finished, submitted to and accepted by the department
• the language(s) used (think of foreign language cites, too),
• the table of contents,
• the bibliography or
• the format (here: PDF) and extend (may be
• the number of pages or
• file size as well).

Last: If you think you’ve created something of worth anyhow, it maybe would make sense to make a scientific artie of it and aim for publishing it in a scientific magazine.

Comments

• jweise: Additionally, I think it is worth mentioning "institutional repositories" as specific type of publishing repository since they are increasingly common on campuses and are often maintained by libraries for the very purpose of preserving the intellectual output of the institution in digital form.

Answer by db48x

Anyone can upload anything to the Internet Archive, independent of the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine is hard or impossible to search; you really need to know the url of the content you want to access. On the other hand, regular items in the archive can have arbitrary metadata and are much easier to search for.

Aside from that, a simple webpage is not very expensive, and will tend to be more authoritative than an item that is merely in an archive.

Comments

• lechlukasz: but something that costs even one cent will cease to exist if there will be noone to pay that cent...

Answer by Andy Jackson

Another excellent option is to use the Arxiv pre-print server, which is a great way to get papers online with appropriate metadata (if they have a suitable category that applies to your work).

Comments

• lechlukasz: Isn't it for English language only?
• Andy Jackson: Good question: No, they accept non-English works if accompanied with an English abstract.