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Thesis Information: Publishing

Getting Started

Considering publishing papers as you go, as part of your thesis, or after your thesis is completed?

Wanting to publish your thesis now that you've finished?

Publishing is an important part of communicating your research, and vital if you want to continue in academia. Consider:

  • talking with your supervisor, they may recommend best approaches and relevant places to start
  • considering options for including your own published articles in your thesis, including University guidelines and copyright permissions
  • creating a conference poster to share your research findings
  • looking for Calls for Papers (CFPs) for relevant conferences and journals to get a sense of in-demand research topics
  • reading academic publishing and higher education blogs for publishing tips
  • applying for a University of Otago Postgraduate Publishing Bursary (once you have submitted your thesis for examination).

Where to Publish?

Think - Check - Submit

Identifying a relevant journal to submit your work can be challenging but will help to get your work accepted, and then read by the right audience. Here are some basic questions to ask yourself when considering a journal:

  • Is it peer-reviewed?
  • What is the subject area of the journal?
  • Is it aimed at the audience you want to write for?
  • Do you read articles from this journal?
  • Are the editor and the members of the editorial board respected researchers in your field?
  • How does the journal compare to others in its field for quality and impact?
  • How long does it take between an article being accepted and it being published?
  • Is it Open Access?
  • What are the copyright policies?
  • What are the journal’s ethical profile and aims?
  • Does the publisher belong to the Open Access Scholarly Publishers’ Association (OASPA)?
  • Do the publisher belong to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) or another trade association?

Adapted from : PhD On Track - CC BY-NC-SA

Here are some tools to help you identify journals in your subject area and to get a sense of their impact in comparison to other journals in the field:

Open Access Publishing & OUR Archive

"Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder" - Peter Suber, A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access.

You can choose to make your thesis open access, and you do this by applying a licence to your work before you submit it to OUR Archive, Otago University's Research Archive. You can then choose to make the fulltext of your thesis available via OUR Archive. This is one way of increasing the visibility of your research, as OUR Archive is indexed by Google and Google Scholar.

Sharing Your Data

Arguments in favour of data sharing include maximising transparency, enabling scrutiny, increasing the impact of research, and reducing the cost of duplication.

Research funding agencies, academic institutions, and publishers may require researchers to provide access to data for the wider scientific community.

Ways to share research data include:

  • Deposit with a discipline-specific or institutional repository
  • Formal exchange of data with other researchers (peer-to-peer)
  • Submission of data to a journal to accompany a publication

Predatory and Deceptive Publishing

Predatory or deceptive publishers seek to take advantage of researchers. Some claim to be Open Access in order to collect payments from prospective authors for journal articles, others may approach you when you submit or deposit your thesis.

Check what you should be aware of with publishing offers.

Books about getting published