Making your PhD thesis openly available will increase your research profile and allows future researchers to explore and build on your results

UK universities increasingly require doctoral students to deposit their final thesis in an openly accessible repository, increasing the visibility of the research and illustrating the great research being undertaken in UK Higher Education.

As a PhD author you also benefit from making your thesis openly available. Open access platforms like EThOS make your research - and your personal research profile - more visible and allow other researchers to make connections and build on your research. It helps prevent people repeating research which is already done, and such visibility could ultimately lead to further research opportunities or even new or renewed funding streams.

You may also find you have no choice: your university – and funder – will probably expect your thesis to be deposited in the institution’s open access repository. Research Councils UK, representing many of the UK’s major funding bodies, has an expectation in this respect set out in their Grant Terms & Conditions. Those conditions state:

“In the case of PhD theses funded by Research Councils, metadata describing the thesis should be lodged in the institution's repository as soon as possible after award and a fulltext version should be available within a maximum of 12 months following award. It is expected that metadata in institutional repositories will be compatible with the metadata core set recommended by the ETHOS e-thesis online service."

Adding your thesis to EThOS

We work directly with each university in the UK to build a comprehensive record of all UK doctoral theses. The bibliographic information about each thesis - author, title, supervisor, abstract and so on - is public data and is shared freely between search systems such as EThOS. We only hold your full thesis in EThOS where we have permission from your university. You can read more here about how we work with each institution. 

Find out how three researchers used EThOS and why they like having their own PhD openly available.