Publishing Your Thesis or Dissertation
ITS-Davis doctoral dissertations and master’s theses are valuable sources of knowledge, and dissemination of that knowledge can benefit you and many others.
Online
We post all PhD dissertations to our ITS-Davis publications website, plus any MS thesis that is endorsed by the major professor as being suitable for posting. Please submit your document as a PDF to our Publications database manager, Katie Rustad, klrustad@ucdavis.edu. Be sure to check the PDF version of the file before you submit, as formatting “adventures” can happen during the translation from the Word file to PDF.
Book format
Modern information and communication technologies are making it very easy and inexpensive to publish your work as a book, and we would like to encourage you to do so.
As just one example among several, Lulu.com enables you to publish your work yourself, while you retain complete control over content and copyright. You simply upload your manuscript, and use Lulu’s formatting tools to customize the appearance to your liking. You can choose a hard-back or paper-back binding.
Nic Lutsey, a recent ITS-Davis PhD graduate, published his dissertation using Lulu and he commented, “Overall, it is super easy. The most time-consuming thing is simply making all of the figures/tables from the dissertation into a size that fits within the 6-by-9 sizing (this could mean scaling down figures, changing some font sizes, and perhaps eliminating less necessary table columns). Maybe that took me a few hours. Submitting to Lulu is as easy as uploading, waiting for them to convert to a PDF format, inspecting the PDF, and approving. The whole thing could easily take less than a day’s work.”
Note that Lulu does allow publication in a letter-size (8.5” x 11”) format, so you could, in principle, simply upload your manuscript as-is (however, we agree that the 6”x9” format looks more professional, as well as requiring less paper…).
We have The Bookshelf in the ITS-Davis large conference room to hold copies of our students’ theses and dissertations published in this way. You can find Nic’s dissertation there, in case you’d like to inspect a sample. If you let us know that you are doing this, ITS-Davis will purchase a copy of your book to display on our shelf along with those of your fellow alumni.
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