Publish your thesis online
Two situations are possible:
1. YOUR THESIS IS DECLARED CONFIDENTIAL BY THE PRESIDENT OF PARIS SUD 11 UNIVERSITY (for instance, to protect a future patent): your thesis must then be deposited according to the regular archiving process and will be catalogued as a bibliographic reference in the library catalog and in national catalogs (such as the Sudoc). The document itself however will not be accessible to the public, either within the university, or on the Internet before the end of the confidentiality clause. You have no means to circumvent this decision.
2. YOUR THESIS IS NOT CONFIDENTIAL: you must deposit your thesis to Paris Sud 11 university library. It will then be archived and referenced in local and national catalogs, French thesis Portal and will be accessible to anyone inside the library. You have no means to prevent this onsite access to your work. You may communicate it to a larger public by allowing its publication online.
Once you have deposited your work, you may decide to take a step further and publish it on the Internet. It remains your decision and will make your work more visible and accessible. Your work will be accompanied by a rich set of metadata following a standard format (TEF, DublinCore) and respectful of various exchange protocols (OAI, etc). It will be part of a formal publication process and processed through formal deposit applications (STAR) which officially date your work in case of plagiarism accusation. The files of your final version must be .pdf files.
If you are the sole author of your thesis
You alone decide of the conditions of its publication online. You may make this decision right after your defence or after an embargo period whose length varies (6 months, 1 year…). In any case you must fill out a form entitled Demande d'hébergement de fichier électronique (Request for Web storage) and return it to the library at the time of your second deposit.
The full text of your thesis will be automatically available at the date you have chosen on several platforms:
- Sudoc catalog and Catalog of Paris-Sud 11 libraries
- Portail des thèses (French thesis Portal)
- TEL (Thèses En Ligne), a section of the platform HAL dedicated to theses. HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research papers, whether they are published or not, and for PhD dissertations.
- DART Europe E-theses Portal, a searchable database of electronic research theses held in European repositories. a catalog for European e-theses. des thèses électroniques européennes (18000 theses from 300 Universités in 19 countries end of 2010)
- And on all the other databases harvesting the metadata STAR generates according to the OAI protocol.
The library is in charge of the whole process of the online publication of your thesis starting from the moment you sign your Demande d'hébergement de fichier électronique. For instance you will not have to deal directly with HAL or TEL.
You have the right to change your mind at all time:
- if you want to request the online publication of your work though at first you did not.
- or if you want to prevent your thesis from being published though at first you had given permission. In that case, please send a registered letter with proof of delivery (“lettre recommandée avec accusé de reception”) to the following address : Université Paris Sud 11, Bât. 300, 91405 Orsay cedex.
If you have used material from other authors (graphs, pictures,…) without asking for or getting their authors’ agreement
You cannot publish your thesis with copyrighted material you are not allowed to use. You must suppress/delete those copyrighted elements and publish your work without them. If you should choose this solution, you must:
- check the following sentence in the appendix to the form “Demande d'hébergement de fichier électronique”: " La version de diffusion (sur internet) est différente de la version d’archivage (version complète validée par le jury) en terme de contenu"
- deposit a set of PDF files specifically dedicated to publication.
If your thesis includes journal articles that you have already published
You are allowed to publish your thesis with preprint versions of your articles, under conditions that the co-authors agree. You may then deposit one version of your work for conservation – with your articles as they were published by the editor – and a different one for online publication – with preprint versions of your articles. If you should do so, you must check the following sentence in the appendix to the form “Demande d'hébergement de fichier électronique”: " La version de diffusion (sur internet) est différente de la version d’archivage (version complète validée par le jury) en terme de contenu".
You can check the publisher copyright policies and self-archiving on Sherpa/RoMEO
The publication online from the servers from the university or the ABES is considered as « self-archiving » one’s work.
If you are considering publishing your thesis, you should contact publishers to ask for their policies on thesis deposit in repositories.
DISCLAIMER: you alone are responsible for the contents of your work.
If your thesis contains one or several articles submitted for publication
University rules permit you to request an embargo on access to your thesis for a specific period. The following procedure is identical to those described above.
To find your thesis on the Internet
The permanent link to your thesis on the ABES’ archival server is built according to the following model : http://www.theses.fr/NNT
“NNT” stands for “national number of thesis”. This identifier is assigned to your thesis by the library and contains the year when you defended your thesis, a code for the university and a classification number.
Example of a thesis defended in 2011 at Paris-Sud 11 university : 2011PA112621
** You will find your thesis’ NNT
- on the certificate of conformity signed by the library
- in the field entitled “Num. national de thèse" of your thesis bibliographic record in the national catalog Sudoc.
Updated 09/19/2011