School of Forestry graduate students are encouraged to post an electronic copy of their work to our School of Forestry Library. This provides a way to share your information with other scientists, managers, and citizens, and is a convenient way to provide access to your work to potential employers and others.

We do not require our students to post to the library because posting a thesis or dissertation to the web might constitute "prior publication" that would preclude publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. A recent survey of journal editors suggests three reasons why this risk is small:

• First, although your committee may have demanded a lot of changes, your thesis is not formally peer-reviewed, an essential condition for a paper to be considered scientifically published (RA Day. 1998. How to write and publish a scientific paper. Oryx Press).
  
• Second, scientific publication is defined as placing the material in a journal or other source document readily available to the scientific community; this is generally considered to be a document listed in the major scientific indexing services. Because web sites are unstable (some journals won't let you cite them for this reason), web-posting does not meet this criterion.
  
• Finally, many departments in many universities post theses to the web, and we are not aware that this has prevented the publication of any papers derived from those theses. Nonetheless, many issues regarding the internet are unsettled, and each journal has its own policy. You may wish to contact the journal to which you plan to submit to determine their policy on this issue.

Students wishing to have their work published to the School of Forestry Library should refer to "If you wish to submit a publication to our library" from the main page of the Library.

Last Updated ( Wednesday, 09 July 2008 )