In accordance with the decision confirmed by Vice President Petri Suomala, the abstracts of bachelor's and master's theses to be saved from January 1, 2024 will always be openly published in the Aaltodoc publication archive together with other metadata of the theses. However, the students still decide whether they want the full text of their theses to be openly published or not. Despite the publication of the abstract, the student still has the copyright to it. The publication does not conflict with the copyright.

The publication decision does not apply to theses archived in Aaltodoc before January 1, 2024. Abstracts will not be published retrospectively.

Due to the new practice, the abstract published in Aaltodoc together with the metadata should not contain information that the author does not want to publish openly online, but such things should be presented elsewhere.

The abstract contains more information than just metadata, and thus publishing it improves the findability of the thesis. Students, teachers and other information seekers can use the abstract to get a more comprehensive picture of the content of the thesis and the research methods used in it. Future thesis authors will also benefit from this. Publishing abstracts increases the transparency of information. Public abstracts make the research work done at Aalto University more visible.

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Thesis as public documents