The thesis: from the discussion to the publication

Have you discussed your PhD thesis at the SNS and wish to share the outcome of your research on the web or propose it to a publisher for publication? Here below are some indications that may be of help to you in achieving your aim in an informed and efficacious manner.

Have you already discussed your thesis? 

The thesis discussed at the SNS, complete with the metadata that describe it and the file containing the full text (accessible in respect of the access policy and any period of embargo defined in the discussion request that you completed), follows an automatic process enabling it to be shared on the web and published in the following contexts:

• IRIS, the SNS institutional research archive where it merges into the specific collection of PhD theses. With this first step, the work is intended as published and the author is recognised as having all consequent moral and property rights; in addition, the assigning of a unique permanent identifier such as the DOI enables it to be cited accurately as a bibliographical and documental resource. The publication of the bibliographical metadata and the full text of the thesis in IRIS complies with an institutional requirement defined in Art. 9 of the SNS Regulations regarding open access to scientific literature of the SNS.

• SEARCH, the SNS library catalogue. Migration is effected, within 48 hours of the date of publication in IRIS, only of theses with a consultable attachment. In SEARCH the PhD theses discussed at the SNS may be found in the SNS collections (if necessary by selecting the IRIS sub-category for a narrower search); in any case, once a more generic search is launched, if SEARCH retrieves multiple responses you can filter the theses utilising the Type of resource = Theses facet (left menu).

  

• Catalogue of the theses of the Magazzini Digitali project of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence (BNCF). The registration of the thesis, complete with the attached file (but always in compliance with the access policy defined by the author) is via an interoperability protocol between IRIS and the final environment, in compliance with a regulation. At the same time BNCF assigns to the thesis a further persistent identifier, the National Bibliographic Number (NBN).

The presence of your thesis on these platforms gives it maximum visibility; in fact, thanks to indexing with machine-readable markup languages such as the DublinCore format to which it has been submitted in IRIS, enables it to be retrieved by general-purpose (Google, Yahoo, Qwant etc.) and specialistic search engines (Google Scholar, for example).

Do you wish to propose your thesis to a publisher?

If you intend to follow this path, we suggest various resources that could help you; however, you must bear in mind that in the case of publication for a publisher it is the case of a work deriving (whether widened, revised or improved) from an intellectual work discussed publicly before a commission and the bearer of a juridical-administrative as well as a scientific-documental value. Consequently, the publisher to whom you propose it can expect neither an embargo of more than 12 months, inducing you to violate Art. 9 of the SNS Regulations regarding open access to scientific literature and the provisions of the call for the PhD course, nor the ex-post removal of the thesis discussed and deposited in IRIS. Negotiate these issues with the publisher and in the editorial contract that is offered you will keep your right to publication in IRIS.

We have chosen some resources that could help you in publishing the results of your PhD research efficaciously and with awareness:

Germano William, From dissertation to book, 2. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. <https://tinyurl.com/mrx7h78r>  
Resource with reserved access on the SNS network
At the centre of this eBook lies the idea that the revision of a thesis is fundamentally a process of shifting its focus from the attention towards a restricted audience formed of a commission to the necessity to gravitate towards a wider audience of scholars. William Germano, the former editor-in-chief of Columbia University Press and later publishing director at Routledge, offers clear indications as to how to do it, with advice on relevant aspects such as those related to the reorganisation of the index, the revision of the more elusive footnotes, the remodelling of the dimension of the chapters and the analysis of the limits inherent to an excessively sectorial jargon that you may have used in your thesis.

Yale University, How to turn your dissertation into a book, evento organizzzato dal Yale Graduate Writing Lab, 11 aprile 2016, video, durata: 57' 48" <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6B7JEsYZyw> 
In this video in English published on the YouTube channel of Yale University, representatives of important university newspapers such as Philip Leventhal (Columbia Univ. Press), Priya Nelson (Univ. of Chicago Press), Jennifer Banks and Heather Gold (Yale Univ. Press) share their experience to assist you in understanding what you can do in order to pass gradually from the status of PhD student to that of published author.