Student Submissions

Theses and dissertations

All theses, disquisitions, and dissertations are automatically archived in NC DOCKS. For more information regarding thesis, disquisition, and dissertation policies, please contact The Graduate School.

Other student works

Non-published student content archived in NC DOCKS must meet the following criteria:

  • Each work must be the intellectual property of a WCU student or group of students.
  • It must be a scholarly, research, or educational work that has been approved for inclusion by a sponsoring WCU faculty member.
  • It must be in electronic form.
  • For written works, the first page must include the Title, Author(s)'s Name(s), Date, and Name of Faculty Sponsor or Advisor.
  • For multimedia or other non-textual items, works must be accompanied by information including the Title, Author(s)'s Name(s), Date, and Name of Faculty Sponsor or Advisor.
  • The author/creator of each work must grant to WCU's Hunter Library a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to preserve, publicly display, and distribute the work in perpetuity and to the general public at no charge via the Web. Contributions to NC DOCKS are entirely voluntary; should the author later wish to remove any contribution, Hunter Library will comply with the request.

Published student content archived in NC DOCKS must meet the following criteria:

  • Each work must be the intellectual property of a WCU student or group of students.
  • It must have been written and/or published while the individual was enrolled at WCU.
  • It must be a scholarly, research, or educational work.
  • It must be complete and in final form.
  • For articles and other textual materials, works must be available in one of the following forms:
    • The author's personal word-processing copy.
    • Published online in PDF form, with a publisher that allows archiving of this version.
  • For non-textual items (presentation slides, audio, video, images, etc), items must be received from the student in a form that can be posted to the database (contact Scottie Kapel, skapel@wcu.edu, for more information).
  • The author/creator of each work must grant to WCU's Hunter Library a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to preserve, publicly display, and distribute the work in perpetuity and to the general public at no charge via the Web. Contributions to NC DOCKS are entirely voluntary; should the author later wish to remove any contribution, Hunter Library will comply with the request.

For more information, or to submit items, students should contact Scottie Kapel, Scholarly Communication Librarian, at skapel@wcu.edu.

The benefits of archiving your research in NC DOCKS

  • Works are archived permanently, with a stable server and a URL that will never break.
  • Authors with works in NC DOCKS enjoy a larger community of readers. Although NC DOCKS has its own search interface, most researchers will use a search engine, such as Google, to discover works archived in the IR. Google "crawls" NC DOCKS for new material and provides keyword access to full text.
  • Researchers worldwide have continuous and perpetual access to publications in NC DOCKS at no cost.
  • As a result of this discoverability and free access to the text, articles that are posted in repositories like NC DOCKS tend to be read more and cited more.
  • For WCU, NC DOCKS is a great way of validating and showcasing the value of the university's faculty to society outside the classroom (UNC Tomorrow, NC taxpayers, and more).