The University’s policy is that graduate theses are public documents to be stored electronically and made freely available by the University Library. Culminating experiences that consist of a “project" are not required to be archived publicly. Individual graduate programs, however, may develop a project archive and/or establish program-level project-archiving requirements
Rationale
Title V education code for Master’s Degrees states that a culminating experience is required for degree completion and may take one of three forms: a comprehensive exam, a project, or a thesis. Current SSU policy (1985-4) requires that theses and projects must be archived in a publicly available format through the University Library. SSU graduate theses are currently
archived through a digital publication platform, ScholarWorks, which follows a process with strict requirements regarding formatting, copyright, and IRB review.
In contrast, projects take many varied formats depending on discipline and specific project parameters. As a result, despite this policy, established in 1985 and re-issued in 2015, implementation of project archiving has not occurred regularly. This is largely due to frequent concerns about use of sensitive material such as proprietary information, embargo due to agreements with private entities, use of confidential information or identity, or missing IRB approval. Moreover, the university and programs typically do not have the appropriate resources to manage the four-fold increase in management of public archiving of culminating experiences if there were rigorous compliance with the current university policy (1985-4).
In order to address numerous concerns regarding a requirement for public archiving of projects, the Graduate Studies Committee has unanimously approved an update to the current policy that maintains the requirement for public archiving of theses, under a consistent format, but removes the university requirement for projects and allows individual programs to determine archiving requirements in accordance with standards in their discipline