This blog post was contributed by Graeme Robinson-Clogg, a former SFU Reference Librarian

By Alice Fleerackers

Changing the academic system to be more accessible

“You shouldn’t have to pay a large sum of tuition to have access to basic information,” Melissa Roach says when I ask her what she’d like to change about our academic system. “It just creates layers of mediation between scholars, media and the public, and that disconnect can cause a lot of misunderstanding.” 

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?