Publish your thesis

Open access, intranet, confidential?

The choice is not neutral! Here are a few thoughts to consider to help you decide.
As an official document validating the award of a degree, the thesis is a document whose deposit, reporting, conservation and distribution are regulated in France by thedecree of May 25, 2016 setting the national framework for training and the procedures leading to the award of the national doctoral degree (articles 24 and 25)
Except in cases of confidentiality, the Service Interétablissment de Documentation is obliged to distribute all university theses at least within the institution of defense.
Extract from the decree:
"Unless the thesis is of a strictly confidential nature, it will be distributed within the institution where it was defended, and to the entire university community".
A wider distribution is left to the doctor's choice:
"Online distribution of the thesis beyond this perimeter is subject to the author's authorization, provided there is no confidentiality clause".
When you submit your thesis, you indicate your distribution choices by signing a distribution authorization form. You are free to change your mind later by contacting us. The Université Grenoble Alpes is responsible for reporting and distributing your thesis.
The university distributes open-access theses on TEL.

Why open access?

Accepting open access for your thesis has many advantages. By facilitating its referencing and consultation via scientific search engines such as Base or Google Scholar, or specialized portals such as Dart-Europe, you will be able to :
  • increase your visibility, that of your laboratory and that of your institution;
  • increase your potential readership, encourage greater sharing and citation of the results of your work ;
  • integrate more easily into the scientific community (immediate submission after the defense can facilitate consultation by a selection panel);
  • protect yourself against plagiarism, since you are publicly identified as the author of the work, and plagiarism becomes easier to detect;
  • ensure long-term access to your work (stable url, long-term archiving).
The CCSD has collected a few testimonials from PhDs:

Emilien Ruiz, Why submit your thesis to TEL?
Sébastien Goulard, Depositing your thesis online: a matter of course
Sandrine Ruhlmann, Complementarity of online and paper publications

Disseminating your thesis on TEL allows you to join the Open Science movement, encouraging the exchange and circulation of ideas around your work.

Immediate release or after an embargo?

You can choose the date from which you authorize the distribution of your thesis in open access, for example if you have articles awaiting publication: simply indicate this in the distribution authorization.

Distribute or publish?

Posting your thesis on TEL does not prevent it from being published:
  • download statistics may encourage a publisher to publish your thesis;
  • the published version may be of interest to readers of your online thesis;
  • the published version requires a thorough reworking of your original text: the two distribution methods are therefore complementary, not contradictory.

On which sites?

The COMUE Université Grenoble Alpes has chosen to distribute theses defended on TELwhich presents 67,000 theses and accounted for 70% of all theses defended in 2015-2016.
TEL content is indexed by the European Theses Portal DART-Europe E-theses Portalwhich references and provides access to more than 730,000 theses from 610 universities in 28 European countries.
It can also be accessed via the European portal OpenAirewhich indexes 20 million open-access publications (including theses) and 500,000 datasets from all over Europe.
Published on April 5, 2017
Updated on September 25, 2017