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Completing Your Master's Thesis

This guide provides resources to graduate students at Central Washington University who are preparing to submit their master's theses.

Recent theses submitted to ScholarWorks

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What is ScholarWorks?

ScholarWorks @ CWU is the institutional repository of Central Washington University. The collection is curated and administered by the James E. Brooks Library. ScholarWorks @ CWU showcases the scholarly and creative output of the University community, including student projects and theses. Per guidelines established by the School of Graduate Studies and Research, all graduate students are required to submit their thesis to ScholarWorks @ CWU prior to graduation.

How to submit your thesis to ScholarWorks

For instructions on submitting to ScholarWorks, please see the following guide. If you have any questions, you can contact the School of Graduate Studies and Research or the Scholarly Communications Librarian at scholarworks@cwu.edu or 509-963-1718.

Thesis Embargo Requests

There are numerous advantages to publicly sharing your thesis via ScholarWorks @ CWU. More people can find and read your work, meaning that you will reach a larger audience and may garner more citations to your work. In addition, you will increase the visibility of Central Washington University and benefit academia at large with your research.

Despite these advantages, in some cases, you may wish to embargo, or temporarily restrict access to your thesis. Three primary reasons for embargoing include:

  • Your thesis has commercially sensitive content. Perhaps you need time to bring a concept to market or seek a patent.
  • You wish to publish all or part of your thesis using a traditional press that regards open access publication as equivalent to prior publication. Most publishers do not operate in this way, but some may. Please do some research before choosing to embargo for this reason.
  • Your thesis contains sensitive data or information.

Please consult your committee chair and committee members when making the decision to embargo. The School of Graduate Studies and Research and the Scholarly Communications Librarian can also offer advice about embargoing your thesis.

In order to embargo your thesis, you must fill out the form below.

Embargo Request forms and Embargo Extension forms must be returned to the Scholarly Communications Librarian via email at scholarworks@cwu.edu.

Students may choose to request a one-, two-, or five-year embargo to protect their ability to publish or patent their work in the near future. An embargo provides a temporary, delayed public release of the work via ScholarWorks @ CWU. Embargo requests must be received at least one month prior to the posting of the thesis to ensure sufficient processing time.

While embargoes are not intended to be permanent, renewals of the original embargo period are permissible. Although there is no limit to the number of times a student can request an embargo extension, embargoes that have been allowed to expire without a request for an extension will result in the thesis being made publicly available via ScholarWorks @ CWU.