Can an unpublished but accepted article be used for an MSc degree? I have a student who is doing his MSc in CS. When he was finishing his courses we managed to present an article and it got accepted for a conference in the field. This conference is going to be in September approximately, and the proceedings will be out in March of the following year.
He wants to present this article as the research dissertation that is one of the requisites for obtaining the MSc degree. Would we have any problems if we publish this article in the database of our Faculty, because this could be available months before the proceedings appear? What can we do in this situation?
I was thinking that maybe the student could make a short paper describing the principal findings of the research we did, citing this unpublished work, and present that to our Faculty repository; would that be feasible? I personally do not believe that the student should have to do another research project, because he already got this one accepted.
Any advice?
This will depend on the conference and on local copyright laws.  I can't speak to the local laws, since I don't know what local is for you.
You may be asked to sign a copyright form, and that form will have the answer for you.  For instance, it may clearly state that the paper in its exact form is not allowed to be reproduced in any way (although I strongly doubt it would, that's a weird thing for an academic paper).  My thesis was paper-based in the sense that it contained literally the papers I wrote and had accepted, in camera-ready form.  We were allowed to do this because the various publishers considered this to be appropriate use (in fact, my copyright forms all explicitly stated that inclusion in thesis documents is acceptable).
If you are not asked to sign anything about copyright, and laws in your country agree, you retain all rights and may do whatever you want.