Publishing online on bonndoc

Each faculty has its own rules regarding formal design. These web pages have templates for you to download:

• Faculty of Protestant Theology
• Faculty of Catholic Theology: not available online unfortunately; please ask the doctoral office
  
• Faculty of Agriculture: not available online unfortunately; please ask the doctoral office
  
• Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences
• Faculty of Medicine:
  • Dr. med/Dr. med. dent.
  • PhD
• Faculty of Arts (the download is called "Gestaltungsvorschriften für die Pflichtexemplare")
• Faculty of Law and Economics (the downloads are called "Vorgaben Dissertationsexemplare")

Please read the following explanatory notes:

• The location to be included on the title page must be your official place of birth (and not, for instance, the town where you live or another place with links to you).
• For the Faculty of Agriculture, Medicine, Arts and Law/Economics: the year on the title page must be the year of publication (i.e. the year the work is published online on bonndoc).
• For the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences:  the year on the title page must be the year the thesis was originally submitted to the doctoral office for review; the year of publication (i.e. the year the work is published online on bonndoc) must be entered on the page with the reviewers’ information.

The title page of your doctoral thesis as described above must be included in your PDF file, usually as the first page. This is followed by another page with details of your reviewers, the day you completed your doctorate and any other relevant information. The specific requirements for the title page and the following page vary from faculty to faculty (see previous question).

However, if you wish, you can also place a freely designed cover as the first page before the title page, which you can also use as a book cover in the printed copies (e.g. for your institute library and your doctoral office). This cover will be displayed as a preview image on bonndoc. You can find an example here.

Exception: for doctoral theses in the Faculty of Medicine (Dr. med./Dr. med. dent.), you are not free to choose your own design and may not use a self-designed cover.

No. PDF files with security restrictions such as passwords, copy protection or blocks on printing are not permitted. We will gladly explain why:

• bonndoc is an open-access publication server, meaning that we only accept data without any usage restrictions. All documents should be as accessible as possible for all readers, and protective settings such as a block on copying or printing present an obstacle in this regard.
• The long-term archiving of all files must be guaranteed. A few years or decades down the line, we or the German National Library may be required to convert the files into other formats due to advances in technology. We can only do this if the documents have no security settings.
• The text has to be extractable in order to be incorporated into our full-text search and to enable your doctoral thesis to be assigned to relevant topics and given keywords in an automated process at the German National Library.

We recommend using special characters and formatting sparingly. If they are essential, however, please use HTML.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) describes the content and layout of a page to be published on the Internet. Within the document, HTML instructions (“tags”) go inside angle brackets. Web browsers then interpret the HTML texts and display them correctly.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions. You can also find more information and help with HTML online.

Here are a few useful tags if you want to make certain text in your abstract or title bold, italic, underlined, etc.:

There are specific HTML codes for special characters not found on a keyboard.

Character codes for Greek letters:

The keywords that you provide for your work yourself by entering them on the online form are put on the Internet as so-called metadata. This makes it easier to do a targeted search for them using various online search engines.

Your keywords should be precise, concise and common in the relevant field. It may help to consider what search terms might be used by other researchers interested in the topics covered by your doctoral thesis. It also makes sense to pick keywords that you are not already using in the title of your work.

We recommend providing at least five keywords. You can enter them in German or English on our registration form (ideally, you will do both).

As the author, you can decide what other people are allowed to do with your work. Creative Commons (“CC”) licenses are frequently used for open-access digital publishing. These are available on bonndoc for your publications. They are a set of predefined licenses featuring various restrictions.
You can find out more about Creative Commons licenses and background information on the Open Access Service Center page about licenses.

The USL Bonn recommends using a “CC-BY” license wherever possible (i.e. reuse allowed if the author is credited). This guarantees the greatest scope for reuse, something that is desirable from a research policy perspective.

Creative Commons licenses are granted voluntarily. If you do not choose a Creative Commons license, your doctoral thesis will be published under a general copyright notice.

You can pick your chosen license in our online form for registering your doctoral thesis (see our step-by-step guide to online publication toward the top of this page).

N.B.: a Creative Commons license can only be granted for cumulative doctoral theses or those including (journal) articles if all the publications that it contains have also been published in an open-access format under a corresponding Creative Commons license. Otherwise, granting a Creative Commons license for these kinds of doctoral thesis is not recommended and the default setting "In Copyright" should be used.

You will be able to request an embargo period for your doctoral thesis on bonndoc under certain circumstances. For instance, this may be necessary if parts of your work are yet to be published in academic journals.

• Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences: in justified exceptional cases, the doctoral board can grant an embargo period of up to one year for the electronic version of the doctoral thesis upon request by the doctoral student and supervisor. The doctoral board can approve an extension of this period in special exceptional cases if another request is made.
• Faculty of Agriculture: doctoral theses published online can be embargoed for up to one year in exceptional cases. The doctoral students concerned make their request to the dean of their faculty in consultation with their doctoral supervisor.
• Faculty of Medicine: an embargo period of up to two years can be granted for the data carriers that are accessible online. To obtain this, the doctoral student and first supervisor will have to submit a joint written request to the doctoral office, stating the reasons. An embargo period of more than two years can only be requested from the doctoral board, stating the reasons.
• All other faculties: although there are no specific rules on embargo periods, please ask your doctoral office whether you might be able to request one in an exceptional case.

A request does not usually have to meet any formal requirements. Please contact your doctoral office directly for more information on how and where to make your request.

The doctoral office will notify the dissertations department at the USL Bonn about any embargo periods that have been approved. Even if your publication is currently embargoed, you will still have met the criteria for completing your doctorate, meaning that you do not have to wait until the end of the embargo period to obtain your certificate.

As well as making your request to the doctoral/dean’s office, please also let us know that you are planning an embargo so that we can make the necessary preparations in good time. To do this, select “Sperre (Embargo) wurde/wird im Dekanat beantragt” (“Embargo has been/is being requested from the dean’s office”) in our registration form for publishing online (alternatively, email us at dissonline@ulb.uni-bonn.de if you do not opt for an embargo until after you have submitted the form).

Yes. However, how exactly additional materials can and should be published varies from case to case. Materials that form an integral part of your doctoral thesis and that are enclosed with the printed copies, e.g. on a CD/DVD, generally have to be published along with the electronic version too. They can be published on our publication server bonndoc directly in many cases. If research data is involved that other researchers can continue working on, however, it is often a good idea to publish it elsewhere, e.g. in specific research data repositories such as bonndata.

Please note that publishing additional materials/research data for a doctoral thesis on personal websites or your department’s website should be avoided as this will not guarantee their long-term availability.

We would be happy to advise you and will refer you on to the Research Data Service Center at the University of Bonn if necessary.

You can find further information on publishing and archiving research data on the center’s pages:

Publishing and archiving research data (accessible only in the university network)

Research data repository bonndata

Once the thesis is on the server, it can no longer be removed from there or modified for legal and integrity reasons.

A doctoral thesis can only be embargoed retrospectively—both on the bonndoc publication server and on the German National Library’s server—in exceptional cases (in the event of e.g. problems with patent procedures, ongoing legal proceedings involving plagiarism, retrospective revocation of a doctorate, unforeseeable problems with a publisher that also published the thesis) and with special permission from the dean’s office for your faculty. In some cases, an amended version of the thesis can be uploaded that is linked to from the embargoed publication.

Well before your work is published, therefore, you should clarify all details (not least with your doctoral supervisor), e.g. whether an embargo period is necessary due to upcoming publications or patent applications.

Although we endeavor to put doctoral theses online as quickly as possible, processing times vary considerably. How long a thesis will take to process depends on numerous factors including:

• How complete your documentation is when you submit
• How soon we receive permission for publishing online from your doctoral office

As soon as we have received all the correct and complete documents, we can finalize the publication within a few days.

Tip: please also think about submitting any forms from the doctoral office there once they are complete (particularly the form 2 on which your doctoral supervisor grants their consent to publishing online if you are with the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences). Otherwise, the doctoral office will not allow us to publish and the process will be delayed.

The USL Bonn does not have any objections in this regard, as you only grant us a simple right of use for publication via bonndoc. All other rights remain with you, so you can use your thesis at any time and publish it elsewhere.
However, the various publishers have differing views on the matter. Although some view publication online as additional advertising, others are categorically against digital publication of the full text because they tend to view it as competition.

If you sign a contract with a publisher, you must make sure that it will not adversely affect your original electronic publication on bonndoc and, if necessary, remove any clauses that give the publisher sole distribution rights. The electronic version on bonndoc cannot be removed or amended retrospectively.

Yes, of course! University of Bonn doctoral theses can be published subsequently online on bonndoc for free. If you have already used a publisher, however, you must first clarify with them whether your work is permitted to be published online.

Essentially, you can follow our step-by-step guide to online publication (see top of this page).

However, you should bear in mind the following:

• The electronic version of your doctoral thesis must have the same content and form as the version that your faculty approved for publication. Please leave your file in the condition it was in originally when you published your thesis for the first time and do not change the year of publication.
• We do not need permission from your faculty or your doctoral supervisor.
• When you are registering via our online registration form, please select “ja” (yes) when you get to “Nachpublikation” (“Subsequent publication”).

Electronic publications on our server can be cited as shown in the example below. However, the exact form the citation will take depends on the citation style you want to use. Different fields tend to use different citation styles. What is important is that the URN link (or handle/DOI link) is always specified, as these are unchangeable persistent identifiers (see also “What are URNs, Handles and DOIs?”).

Last name, first name:
title of thesis : subtitle, if there is one
Location, year of publication
Type of thesis, university
URN link (you will find this on the page for your thesis on bonndoc)

Example: Doe, John: Online publications at German universities : an empirical study. - Bonn, 2023. - Doctoral thesis, University of Bonn. Online edition on bonndoc: https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hbz:5-XXXXX

URN (Uniform resource name), Handle or DOI (Digital object identifier) are to electronic documents what the ISBN is to books, i.e. they act as unchangeable persistent identifiers that are valid internationally.

Any thesis published on bonndoc is given a URN and a Handle, which are displayed on the publication’s bonndoc page in the “Zitierbare Links” (“Citable links”) box. Upon request, you can additionally receive a DOI for your thesis.

In principle, the URL displayed in the address bar of the browser (e.g. https://bonndoc.ulb.uni-bonn.de/...) only specifies the server on which it is stored, not the document itself. If the document is moved to a different server, this URL will change.

By contrast, the URN, Handle or DOI — as identifiers of the document itself — will remain unchanged. Should the document be relocated to another server one day, a system running in the background will update the destination linked to by the URN, Handle or DOI to the new location. This allows a logical and traceable citation method that will last for decades.

For this reason, you should never use the URL displayed in your web browser’s address bar when citing a publication on bonndoc — always use the URN or Handle link (or the DOI link, if applicable) instead (starting with https://nbn-resolving.org/..., https://hdl.handle.net/ or https://doi.org/...). Which of the  identifiers you use is up to you, as all are of equal value.