An Open, Online Astronomy Thesis Collection

How can people access your thesis and/or dissertation? Most people would answer that the library of their institution has a copy, they have a copy, and perhaps there is a copy at the Library of Congress.  But it is difficult to find full-text online, for instance in the NASA ADS.  Now is your opportunity to give your thesis or dissertation greater visibility by posting it online in the Astronomy Thesis Collection!

This thematic, community-wide repository – hosted by Zenodo and managed by OpenAire/CERN – is curated by astronomy librarians and indexed by the NASA ADS.

Even if the ADS already lists your dissertation, you can provide access to a free, full-text, online version of your own work, so that ADS can link to it from its bibliographic database and index its full-text contents.

Continue reading for some tips on uploading to the Astronomy Thesis Collection.  Prefer a full walk-through?  Try this instead. Or if you are in a hurry, try these brief points to remember.

Making Your Thesis or Dissertation Available in the NASA ADS

Please note: Unless you have special permission, you should only upload your own thesis or dissertation.  Make sure that you have permission to upload someone else’s thesis or dissertation before doing so.

Go to the Astronomy Thesis Collection on Zenodo and either sign in or sign up (using your GitHub or ORCID account can make this signing up faster), and then navigate to the Community page for Astronomy Thesis Collection.  Click the blue upload link on this page to begin.

Points to Remember!

Below are the most important things to remember when uploading your dissertation:

• Two DOIs are not better than one!  If your institution assigned a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) to your dissertation already, add it to the record in the space provided.  If you do not have a DOI, one will be assigned to you automatically.  Remember that ADS bibcodes and DOIs are not the same.  A bibcode is a related/alternate identifier that you should enter further down the page.
• Enter the date your thesis was accepted or your graduation date for publication date. An accurate year is the most important part of this date.
• Your affiliation in this case is your awarding university.
• The Description field is intended for your abstract.  This field is compatible with mathematical and scientific symbols, but you must use the buttons marked with sigma (Σ), omega (Ω), and pi (Π) above the white box to make them display properly (see walk-through for more information).
• The default Open Access license in Zenodo is Creative Commons Attribution (the most popular fully open-access license for non-code).  Contact your institution with further questions or learn more here http://creativecommons.org/choose/. Please note that should you choose Closed Access, the ADS will not be able to link to the full-text of your thesis.
• If this thesis is already in ADS, please give us the bibcode!  Go to the “Related/alternate identifiers” tab near the bottom and select “is alternate identifier” from the drop-down menu.  See example below.

• If you previously uploaded material (e.g. datasets or drafts) related to your thesis, you can link it to your thesis by adding another related identifier field. Paste the identifier (e.g. DOI or arXiv identifier) for the supplemental material and choose the appropriate description.
  • After uploading your thesis, you may upload related material to the community page. Be sure to include the DOI for your thesis and select “is supplemented by this upload.”
• The Thesis tab allows you to list your awarding university and to give credit to your supervisors.

If you have further questions, check out our walk-through, or contact astrocuration@gmail.com.