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My department requires dissertations from all honours students (being England, that's basically all of them). Some of these are extremely good, even though they are written by undergraduates. My department for some years created a tech report series, which included undergraduate dissertations with high enough marks and the agreement of the supervisor, but now this system has gotten lost in a morass of web redesigns etc.

Is there any new norm for archiving good undergraduate dissertations? We were thinking of just putting it in arxiv.org, is that considered acceptable? We are writing an article and want to cite the dissertation for the full implementation details.

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So long as the material can be construed as "publishable" in its submitted form, and falls under one of the categories in arXiv, then it should be OK. However, I'd recommend making your question more general, by asking if there are external repositories for undergraduate and master's theses. –  aeismail Dec 9 '12 at 11:03
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@aeismail I find this question nice "as it is". Moreover, it is not equivalent to "are there any external repositories for undergraduate and master's theses". –  Piotr Migdal Dec 9 '12 at 13:01
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Unsurpisingly, I agree with Piotr. Though I agree the general question could also be a question, average dissertations and tech-report-worthy dissertations are different things, at least at the undergraduate level. –  Joanna Bryson Dec 9 '12 at 16:46
    
My issue is that the question "reads" as too narrow, since it's basically asking a question that could be answered by looking at the arXiv.org FAQ's. That would mean it's not a good candidate for Academia.SE. –  aeismail Dec 9 '12 at 17:13
    
@aeismail I don't think that this question is too narrow. Also, arXiv FAQ (or rather - arxiv.org/help/moderation) is not very clear on that matter (nor it should be). –  Piotr Migdal Dec 9 '12 at 23:58

2 Answers 2

up vote 19 down vote accepted

Yes.

Any research writing (paper, report, monograph, dissertation, preprint, etc.) approaching publishable quality is welcome on ArXiv, whether its'written by tenured faculty, postdocs, graduate students, undergraduates, high school students, or hamsters.

(I am the ArXiv moderator for cs.DM and cs.CG. I have not, as far as I know, accepted a paper from a hamster.)

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Thanks! But a dissertation is not really a paper, but I am talking about dissertations that I think contain publishable material. Is that close enough? I'm sorry that we found the arxiv documentation a little vague on this matter. –  Joanna Bryson Dec 9 '12 at 22:18
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The “whether it's written by …” clause lacks a “random paper generator” item –  F'x Dec 10 '12 at 8:54
    
@F'x: well, it depends on how you interpret "approaching publishable quality" ;-) –  Anthony Labarre Dec 10 '12 at 9:32

Seconding the main point of JeffE's answer, ArXiv is "only weakly moderated", and makes no demands about status, rank, university affiliation, etc.

However, there appear to be mild expectations about format. Beyond the lowest-level TeX/LaTeX requirements, it seems that papers should be in the format of a paper submittable for publication-in-a-refereed-journal. I can imagine the possibility that formats for undergrad dissertations might or might not be enforced, and/or might be substantially different (even if conforming to a formal requirement).

But/and I'd think that a rewritten version of a good thesis would easily be arXiv-able.

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Even those formatting requirements are very mild. All you really need is a title, an abstract, and a bibliography. –  JeffE Dec 10 '12 at 3:48
    
Thanks, @JeffE, for the authoritative comment. We'd hope that undergrad theses would be in the right ballpark, but I hesitated to presume! :) –  paul garrett Dec 10 '12 at 3:49
    
Argh, this answer is the one that made JeffE's one into an Answer, so I wasn't sure how to allocate the points, but then with JeffE's edits he would have got it anyway... anyway, you have my thanks :-) –  Joanna Bryson Dec 10 '12 at 8:28
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Can we send away for secret decoder rings when we have enough points? :) –  paul garrett Dec 10 '12 at 11:54

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