Submission of theses and dissertations

All theses and dissertations must be submitted electronically in Munin for assessment electronically in Munin. This means that you can submit from home or when travelling, no matter where you are. The submission deadline will be determined by your department or faculty and must be met. Munin is available 24/7. The time at which you submit your thesis or dissertation will be recorded and it is therefore important that you meet the deadline.

Remember that the submission of your master’s thesis in Munin does not mean that the thesis is automatically made available. Munin has many features:

• After you submit your thesis, the student administration will submit it to the examiner and manage all other administrative tasks.
• All submitted master’s theses, including those that are failed, will be kept for posterity in a closed archive. This is something the institution is required to ensure.
• The thesis is subsequently made openly available through Munin, provided there are no reasons why it should not be made available.

When you submit your thesis, you will have the opportunity to add a comment as to whether the thesis should be made openly available as soon as possible or whether you have other wishes. Open access to your thesis will be a great advantage when applying for jobs or in other contexts in which you need to reference your thesis. And of course, many other people will find it extremely useful to be able to access your thesis. Knowledge is built block by block, so please ensure that your thesis becomes such as building block!

Some master’s students (and their supervisors) state that the thesis should not be made openly available through Munin before one or two years have passed because the thesis will be reworked into a scientific article and published in a scientific journal. They justify this by the fact that it would be difficult to publish the article if the thesis is openly available. There are probably some unfounded fears at play here. Most journals do not care if your master’s thesis is openly available when it has been reworked and submitted as an article script. So those of us working with Munin would very much like to alleviate these fears.

Nevertheless, if you still want to wait to make your thesis openly available, you will have the opportunity, at the time of submission, to select that your thesis can be made available in one or two years or after a different period of time chosen by you. If you change your mind at a later date, you can easily change your selection by contacting the University Library.

Remember that all master’s theses are public documents, including theses that have not been made available through Munin. Anyone can ask to view theses that have not been openly published via Munin. If a thesis must be exempt from public disclosure, this must be done through an explicit resolution in line with applicable regulations (cf. Section 33 of the Norwegian Examination Regulations) (available in Norwegian only).

You must follow the submission instructions issued by your department or faculty. But here are a few general items that apply to most:

• Theses must be submitted in PDF format.
• You must make sure that you have permission to make any images and illustrations included in your thesis openly available through Munin if others hold the rights to these.
• You will be asked to enter a thesis summary of approximately 200 words. Please focus on providing a descriptive summary and make sure that this is ready before you start your submission. The summary can be repeated in several languages.
• Feel free to consider a few suitable keywords that are representative of the topic of the thesis. Such keywords can be added during submission.
• If you cancel the submission before you have completed it, you will be able to continue where you left off when you next log in.

Good luck!