In the academic research world, things are still largely paper and journal based.  This makes a lot of sense, you send an article to a journal, it’s reviewed by academic peers, and then published in a journal.  For most dissertations, the goal is to publish a hardcopy, which sits in a library somewhere.  More pro-active institutions allow you to download dissertations from a library website, and often times the content has also been published in journal form.

I’ve been thinking of how to publish and promote my dissertation online, to maximize its impact on the world.  This just means, I want to make it as open as possible for search engines and interested researchers to find and to read.  I thought about making it into a giant webpage, and am still working on converting it to a Joomla! website, but this isn’t automatic, although published it on a content management system like Joomla! or Wordpress offers the best mix of on-demand reading and SEO.  In conjunction with a book I’m promoting, I decided to experiment with Issuu.com, where one can upload a PDF document and then embed a viewer (flash based) anywhere on the internet.  This offers many advantages.  For one, anyone can access the dissertation with a web browser, second, it can be easily embedded and distributed like an online magazine.

One primary drawback of Issuu is that is isn’t easy to quickly search through a document, which is really needed when going through a research document.  That’s one reason why publishing on a CMS website is ideal, because the document is then fully optimized for searching and a reader can quickly find the most important parts of the research, which they can then use to further their own projects.