All master's theses that are written in public educational establishments and lead to a degree are, according to the Act on the Openness of Government Activities, official documents that are public unless specifically otherwise provided. (The Constitution of Finland, Section 12.2; Act on the Openness of Government Activities, Section 1).
The Act also defines what kind of official documents are secret. Such are for example documents that contain information on business or professional secrets and documents that contain the basic materials for a dissertation or other scientific study, or the assessment of the same (Section 24). In master's theses the secret information should only be included in the background material.
According to the guidelines published by the MInistry of Education and Culture (2/500/2004) universities and universities of applied sciences must ensure that master's theses do not contain secret material, and that they are available to the public immediately after their approval.
Electronic publication of the thesis
When you submit your thesis for examination, you must choose the extent to which your thesis will be available on the web.
If you select the open publishing method, your approved work will be published as a full text in the UTUPub publication repository, where it is open to everyone. Your thesis will get a permanent URN (Uniform Resource Name) that can be easily shared and easily referenced (eg in a CV).
If you choose the limited publishing method, your thesis metadata (including author, title, approval date, subject and unit / faculty data) and summary text will be stored in the UTUPUb publishing repository without the full text of your thesis.
NB. If the thesis is an article or consists of articles: make sure that the publication journal of the article allows a thesis / article to be published in the UTUPub publication repository as a thesis / part of the thesis. In such cases, it is wise to discuss the matter first with the supervisor.
What if my thesis contains trade secrets?
The actual thesis should not contain trade or professional secrets; they can only be included in the background material.
Submitted theses are made publicly available after approval, including on the internet, if the student has agreed to this during the submission process.
How can I read master's theses whose availability is restricted?
The master's theses whose public availability the student has chosen to restrict can be read on particular workstations at Turku University Library. The use of the workstations and the material are governed by the Copyright Act, meaning that the content cannot be copied digitally, saved on a storage medium or sent by email. The workstations cannot be accessed through the off-campus access service. Printing of the material is possible.
Can I borrow theses with restricted availability through interlibrary loan?
The library does not loan master's theses with restricted availability through interlibrary loan.
Will my thesis grade appear on the open network?
The grade of the thesis and the reviews are not published online or in the library workstations.
Grading is available on request from the faculty.
I would like to change the publication method of my thesis, is it possible?
You can change the method of publishing your thesis at any time, but you need to be in touch with the University Library at publications@utu.fi.
I noticed an error in my thesis when I submitted it for examination/ when reading my thesis in UTUPUb publication repository. Can I send a new, corrected version of my thesis to the repository?
The student can not make changes to his / her thesis after being submitted for examination and publication (= student has verified the publication details of the thesis on the UTUGradu form). However, if you find that there are small-scale corrections or refinements (may be a typing error, a mistake in paging etc.) to be made that do not generally affect the examination of the thesis but are more cosmetic, you can contact the library (publications@utu.fi) and ask to add a the so-called " errata" (= error list attachment) where you can report the corrected items in your work.
It is no longer possible to make changes to the examined and approved thesis file itself.
An example of the errata attachment:
After the Master's thesis being approved, the following errors have been identified:
page 6, row 2. Name of the person: Virtainen, should be Virtanen.