When I posted my Master's thesis on sustainable urban mobility online for free in early 2020, I didn't expect 350 readers to work through 8,000 pages of it. And yet, that's what happened over the following year.
In addition to those 350 readers, there were countless more on Google Books, Google Scholar, Sci-Hub, and my university's library website. At least two bachelor theses (that I know of) built directly on my work. I was grateful to be invited by DIE ZEIT to speak about it within their Festival of Young Visionaries. And across the internet, numerous discussion posts reference the thesis. I was totally blown away and genuinely happy about all of it.
The reach meant more to me than a personal milestone. It was a strong signal for free science. Free science, in the sense I use the term here, is the practice of making research outputs such as publications, data, code, and theses, openly available to anyone, at no cost and without paywalls or institutional gatekeeping. It is closely related to the broader open science movement, which holds that publicly funded knowledge should remain a public good, and to open access, the part of that movement focused on removing price and permission barriers to scholarly publications.
Even if you think it doesn't matter: please consider sharing your own work and findings. Knowledge only grows by being passed on. If you want to dig into mine, you can read the full thesis and watch a short trailer of the proof of concept at my Master's project on desirable future mobility. Let's talk about it.
I've kept thinking about the themes that thread through that thesis: how design can act as a translator between technology and culture, how a European approach to design might resist the slow enshittification of digital products, and how antifragile companies turn shocks into fuel for innovation.
Read next:
- Antifragile by Design — how companies turn crises into innovation fuel
- Design translates technology into culture — the thread that runs from the thesis outward
- A European approach to design vs. enshittification — what design-led resistance can look like
FAQ
What is free science?
Free science, in the sense the term is used on this site, is the practice of making research outputs such as publications, data, code, and theses openly available to anyone, at no cost and without paywalls or institutional gatekeeping. It is closely related to the broader open science movement, which holds that publicly funded research should remain a public good, and to open access, the part of that movement focused on removing price and permission barriers to scholarly publications. The goal is not to give things away for free, but to make sure that knowledge paid for collectively does not get locked behind subscriptions a few years after publication.
How is open access different from open science?
Open access is a subset of open science. Open access specifically refers to removing price and permission barriers on scholarly publications such as articles, theses, and books, so that anyone can read them without paying. Open science is the wider umbrella: it includes open access but also covers open data, open source code, open peer review, open educational resources, and citizen science. A thesis can be open access without being part of a broader open science practice. A researcher practising open science, on the other hand, will usually publish open access as a baseline.
Should I make my Master's thesis publicly available?
In most cases, yes. A Master's thesis is usually publicly funded (through the university, through scholarships, or through research grants) and rarely has commercial value that needs protecting, which is exactly the case open access was designed for. Posting it on the university's institutional repository, on a personal site, or on a service such as the German Hochschulpublikationsserver usually costs nothing, takes an afternoon, and dramatically increases the chance that someone in a related field will actually read it. The only real reasons not to are embargoes tied to forthcoming journal articles or patent-relevant content, and even those are usually time-limited.
Why should publicly funded research be open to the public?
Because the public already paid for it. When a Master's thesis, a research project, or a peer-reviewed article is funded by taxpayers, charitable foundations, or public universities, the resulting knowledge belongs in the public domain in spirit if not always in law. Paywalls on publicly funded research mean that the people who paid for the work often have to pay again to read the outcome. Universities, in turn, spend growing portions of their budgets on subscriptions to journals that publish research their own staff wrote. Open access and open science are, at their core, a corrective to that loop.