embargo of MBA T or Capstones to protect company secrets?

[Molly Tighe]

Hello All,

Does anyone allow embargo of Business theses (or capstones) describing collaboration with a business and potentially including company secrets?  We currently allow embargo for those looking to obtain a patent, those looking to publish, and "other."  Our MBA program allows students to choose between a thesis or a capstone project, the latter of which entails working closely with a business as a case study.  I've not seen mention of company secrets in discussions of ETD embargo, but I'm fairly new to this area.  I'd appreciate hearing thoughts from the list.  

Many thanks,

Molly Tighe

Chatham University 

[Strand, Judith K [G COL]]

We allow temporary embargoes, but not permanent or long term ones.  If a graduate student will be conducting the research on proprietary information, that graduate student should not use this work as the basis for her or his thesis/dissertation.  The Graduate College approves embargoes on theses and dissertations only when they are highly justified and unavoidable.  In this case, the student can carry out the research described in the proposal to fulfill expectations associated with a research assistantship.  The student’s thesis/dissertation scholarship should be on a different (though potentially related) topic that is not bound by the publication restriction.

 

Judy Strand

Iowa State University

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[Molly Tighe]

Thanks so much, Judy!  This is very helpful! 

Molly

[Corbett, Hillary]

We also advise our students that because the university doesn’t allow permanent embargos (except in very rare cases), they should not write about something that can never be made public. We ran into this problem years ago with some of our undergraduate engineering capstone projects — the departments were initially enthusiastic about including them in our repository but stopped participating when several companies that the students had worked with complained about privileged information being shared. (We advocated for a revision of the capstone project guidelines to include a component about writing for a public audience, which in my opinion is a valuable learning objective and which would have allowed them to continue depositing the students’ work, but they did not go in that direction.)

Hillary

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Hillary Corbett

Director, Scholarly Communication and Digital Publishing

University Copyright Officer

Northeastern University Libraries

360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115

617.373.2352 | h.co...@neu.edu

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[Molly Tighe]

Thank you, Hillary!  Your point about making capstones a learning opportunity in writing for a public audience is fantastic.  Much appreciated!

Molly