It can be daunting to think about your thesis or dissertation being openly available in Summit for anyone to find and read. You may have heard concerns about plagiarism, predatory publishers or limitations on your ability to publish a manuscript based on your openly available thesis. Be reassured that, for the most part, these concerns are unwarranted. Most universities in Canada make their students' theses and dissertations open.

Happy Fair Dealing Week!

February 25 to March 1 is Fair Dealing Week 2019. Fair Dealing Week (and Fair Use Week in the US) "is designed to highlight and promote the opportunities presented by fair use and fair dealing, celebrate successful stories, and explain these doctrines" (Association of Research Libraries, fairuseweek.org).

Your Masters or PhD thesis is the result of years spent in study of a specific topic. It's no surprise that many grads would like to turn their thesis into an article, a series of articles, a book chapter or a monograph.

Do you have the right to do this? What are SFU's rights to your thesis? Will publishers want a work that is based on a thesis, especially once the thesis is publicly available in Summit?

If you are new to Open Access publishing, you might find the variety of license options used by journals overwhelming. What's the difference between CC BY and CC BY-NC-ND? What do those letters even mean? Which one is better?

It's Open Access Week, so what better time to get to know Creative Commons licenses?