Publishing a cumulative doctoral thesis/a doctoral thesis that includes articles

This website deals with all doctoral theses that contain journal articles or other scientific contributions such as book chapters (hereinafter referred to as "articles" for short) in complete form that you have already published with a publisher or submitted for publication. This also extends to included preprints or accepted manuscripts of such articles.

Although individual parts have already been published, the doctoral thesis as a whole will still need to be published after the doctoral examination procedure is complete. In certain cases, the faculty will allow you to remove included articles before publishing the entire thesis. If you want to publish included articles, you must check which conditions you have to comply with before (online) publication of the entire thesis, as the publishers may hold relevant rights. In some cases, for instance, you will:

Only be allowed to use a specific version of the article in your doctoral thesis
Be required to include certain phrases in your doctoral thesis at the start of the chapters containing your articles
Request an embargo period for the online publication of your doctoral thesis.

This web page contains general information about publishing a cumulative doctoral thesis/a doctoral thesis that includes articles. However, different faculties have different requirements concerning whether and in what form a cumulative doctoral thesis can be written, what additional criteria apply and in what circumstances you are permitted to remove attached articles. Please always ask your doctoral office and consult the doctoral degree regulations and if necessary your supervisor.

What to do

1. Removing articles?

If necessary, clarify whether you have to publish the included articles when publishing your entire thesis or not. In particular, if these are only attached as an appendix, you may remove articles published or already accepted for publication before the publication of the thesis in certain cases if your doctoral regulations provide for this (this is the case with the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Agricultural, Nutritional and Engineering Sciences) and/or or the responsible doctoral body has approved this. Please consult your doctoral regulations and ask your doctoral office.
If you remove articles, you must always include the bibliographical information of these articles and use the DOI (if applicable) to link to the publisher's version in the thesis.
Nevertheless, we recommend the publication of the entire thesis including the complete articles, provided that the legal conditions allow this. In many cases this is possible.

2. Check the legal requirements

As the author, you are responsible for clarifying the rights situation for the articles that you would like to publish within your thesis.
In the simplest scenario, your articles will be open-access publications, e.g. those published under the popular “CC BY” Creative Commons license or other CC licences, in which case you will be able to use them in accordance with the terms and conditions of your license without needing to consult the publisher.
Otherwise, your rights and obligations will be set out in the contract with your publisher. Please check this contract carefully and do not hesitate to ask your publisher if anything is unclear. Publishers often also offer special, less stringent terms and conditions for use within doctoral theses.
The following websites will give you a good overview of the terms and conditions that publishers apply:
- Publisher theses policies - this list has been compiled by TU Berlin specifically for use in doctoral theses.
- Sherpa Romeo - search by the title or ISSN of the journal in which you published.
- Please bear in mind that both websites provide guidance only, not legally binding information.
The publishers’ own websites also often provide useful information (generally on pages called e.g. “Sharing Policy,” “Copyright Policy,” “Rights Permission,” “Self-Archiving” or “Green Open Access”).
If there are any co-authors, it is always a good idea to get their consent to publish the article(s) in your doctoral thesis.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any general questions, although you should be aware that we are unable to provide legal advice.

3. Incorporating your articles in your doctoral thesis

In case of non-Open Access articles, your publisher may have specific requirements for incorporating your articles in your doctoral thesis. In some cases, for instance, you will only be allowed to use a certain version of an article (preprint, accepted manuscript or the version used by the publisher) or will have to include specific wording (e.g. “© Publisher XY. Reprinted, with permission [full citation of original published article]...”).
You should always give the full bibliography for each article and use the DOI (if applicable) to link to the publisher's version.
For online publication, you should incorporate your pages of articles into the file as a machine-readable PDF so that the text can still be copied. Integrating article pages as image files is not a suitable method for reasons connected with full-text search and accessibility.
We recommend adding continuous pagination, including on the pages containing the articles, as this will make it easy for other researchers to cite your doctoral thesis (some faculties even make this a requirement).

4. Our recommendation: overview of articles

Future readers of your doctoral thesis will find it very useful if you provide an overview of the included (and, if applicable, removed) articles. We therefore recommend incorporating such a list in your cumulative doctoral thesis, e.g. toward the beginning of the document (after the table of contents or in the introduction). For all articles, this should include:

Full bibliography for the article
Active DOI link, beginning with https://doi.org/... (if applicable)
An indication of the version (preprint, accepted manuscript or version used by the publisher)
Details of the page/chapter in the doctoral thesis where the article can be found

The overview of publications may look something like this (however, please always follow your faculty’s specifications):

List of publications

Parts of this thesis have been published in peer-reviewed journals:

1) Doe, Jane; Musterfrau, Maxi; Doe, Joe. A fancy title. The fancy journal, 2022, 3 (4): 22-30.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1000/demo_DOI
The published version is reproduced in Chapter 3.2 of the thesis.

2) Musterfrau, Maxi; Doe, Jane; Mustermann, Max. A second article title. The other fancy journal, 2021 , 3 (4): 1-30.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1000/demo_DOI-2
The accepted manuscript of this article is included in Chapter 4.2 of the thesis.

3) Doe, Jane; Musterfrau, Maxi; Mustermann, Max; Doe, Joe. A third article. WOW journal, 2020, 1 (1): 20-40.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1000/demo_DOI-3
The published version is reproduced in Chapter 5.2 of the thesis.

(Of course, in a new list section you can also list other articles written by you that are not included in the thesis but are based on your research on your doctoral topic.)

5. Publishing your doctoral thesis

Once all the above questions have been answered, you essentially have the same options for publishing your cumulative doctoral thesis/doctoral thesis that includes articles as you do for a monograph one. The following links contain all the information you need plus step-by-step guides for each publication method. Please now proceed in accordance with the information you will find on these web pages.

Publishing the thesis online on our bonndoc publication server, potentially in combination with requesting an embargo period
Using a publisher (this is fairly rare for cumulative doctoral theses)

FAQs

Publishing cumulative doctoral theses

What’s meant by the various versions of an article such as “preprint” or “version used by the publisher?”

People usually distinguish between three different versions of a (journal) article that can be used in a doctoral thesis depending on the legal regulations:

Preprint (also known as the submitted version, author’s version, draft or manuscript version)
The manuscript that you submitted originally prior to peer review
Accepted manuscript (also known as the postprint, accepted version, final draft, peer-reviewed version or final author version)
The version accepted by the publisher, including amendments from peer review but excluding the final layout/printproof by the publisher
Version used by the publisher (also known as the version of record (VoR), published version, publisher PDF, final version)
Final published version with the publisher’s layout

Contact

Dissertations department

We receive all the doctoral theses written at the University of Bonn, publish theses online and help doctoral students through the publication process.
Availability by e-mail and phone: Monday to Friday, 9 am to 4 pm.