PhD dissertations

Upload your thesis to MyPhD. A few days before your defense, your thesis will be made open access via the UU Repository. However, it is possible to postpone the publication date (embargo).  In that case, make sure you comply with NWO’s requirement and make your dissertation open access within twelve months of your PhD Defense. 

Article-based dissertation

It is likely, given NWO’s open access requirements, that all articles in your dissertation are already openly available and you are free to share them elsewhere without embargo. However, if you used the Rights Retention Strategy on an article and it has been less than six months since that article was published, make sure you include your author’s version (AAM) in your dissertation, rather than the publisher’s version. If it has been more than six months, you can include the published version.

It is possible that not all articles in your dissertation have been submitted to a journal or accepted for publication. This isn’t usually grounds to impose an embargo. Under publication type Preprint you can find more information about publisher policies around previously shared work.

Long-form dissertation

Are you writing a dissertation in book form? You can choose to keep your dissertation under embargo if you want to submit it to a publisher after your defense. For instance, you may be hoping to publish a trade edition or intend to rework a chapter into a journal article. In most cases, however, an embargo won’t be necessary: most publishers and journals do not have an issue with previous versions of the work being openly available through a repository.

See publication types Monograph and/or Trade book for more information on how to find a publisher for your trade edition.