Whether a doctoral thesis (doctoral dissertation) may be made publicly available on the internet when it is based on work that has already been submitted to or published in an academic journal, or published as a book, depends on the policies of the respective publishers.
Because copyright policies vary by journal and publisher, it is important to carefully review and understand the submission guidelines, copyright policies, copyright transfer agreements, and license agreements.
Key Points to Check
- Whether copyright is transfereed to the publisher, and if so, which rights are transferred.
- Whether you are permitted to use your journal article or published work as a doctoral thesis.
- Whether the doctoral thesis may be made publicly available online through the institutional repository.
It is strongly reommended that these points be confirmed either when submitting your manuscript or when it is accepted for publication. If these are not explicitly addressed, you can contact the publisher for clarification.
In many cases, publication agreements that include the transfer of copyright to the publisher still permit the work to be used as a doctoral thesis.
However, with regard to internet publication, many publishers impose conditions, such as requiring the use of the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version, permitting public availability only after a specified embargo period, or both.
Publishers may also require that information about your journal article used as the basis of a doctoral thesis be included in the thesis.
If the doctoral thesis itself cannot be modified, this requirement can be met by adding a page containing the necessary information at the beginning of the PDF file when making the thesis publicly available through an institutional repository.
When your doctoral thesis cannot be made publicly available online due to restrictions under the agreement with the publisher, it is also possible to make an abridged version publicly available instead of the full text.
For further details, please refer to the "Checklist for Web-Based Publication of Doctoral Thesis" and the "Application for Publication of Thesis under Special Circumstances".