Writing your doctoral thesis
For information on formal aspects of your doctoral thesis including a template for the thesis title page please consult the website of the Doctoral Administration Office.
Publication requirement
Based on the Ordinance on Doctoral Studies and the Implementation Provisions and in keeping with ETH Zurich’s Open-Access Policy, doctoral students are obliged to upload the corresponding electronic file of the approved doctoral thesis onto ETH Library’s institutional repository, i.e. that means publishing it via the Research Collection.
If an electronic publication is not possible for copyright or patent-related reasons or due to ongoing applications at research funding institutions, the doctoral student can temporarily be released from the electronic publication obligation. The abstract will be published in any case.
The temporary non-publication of the full text of a doctoral thesis can be requested in the submission process when uploading the electronic file to the Research Collection (cf. Access rights). The doctoral student needs to indicate the reason for the embargo and can choose between an embargo period of 12, 24 or 36 months.
Please not that the embargo requested in the Research Collection is only applicable to the electronic version of the doctoral thesis. Exclusively in the case of embargo applications based on patent applications, a lending restriction of a maximum of twelve months will be imposed on the printed copies.
Publication of cumulative doctoral theses
If you plan to integrate articles that have already been published or that have been accepted by a journal into your doctoral thesis, please read through the information provided on the website of the Doctoral Administration Office in the paragraph "Cumulative doctoral thesis".
To read up on publishers' policies regarding cumulative doctoral theses go to this page.
Publication of research data
According to the ETH Zurich’s Guidelines for Research Data Management and the Guidelines for Research Integrity at ETH Zurich, ETH members are required to publish research data and porgramming code that are considered as directly relevant for a result publication in a FAIR repository such as the Research Collection. This also includes research data produced as part of a doctoral thesis at ETH Zurich. Further information can be found under research data.
For better reusability of the research data, we also recommend linking it to the publication of the doctoral thesis in the Research Collection.
ETH user account expired?
If you no longer have an ETH user account to submit your doctoral thesis, please contact us to receive a guest account.
Exchange and/or correction of published thesis
Please note that as soon as you have submitted your PDF and received confirmation of its release, it is no longer possible to change the PDF or its content. Significant changes of content can be submitted and published in the form of an erratum or corrigendum.
Open acccess dissertations & publishers' prior publiation policies
Many adademic publishers nowaday accept articles for publication, even if they have already been published online as part of an open access dissertation. Similar to how preprints are treated, online disssertations often also do not count as "prior publication" according to many publihers's policies.
See also: Discussion document on best practice for issues around theses publishing (by the Commitee on Publication Ethis)
Printed deposit copies
Please go to the page Deposit copies for information on how to submit your print copies.
External doctoral theses
External doctoral theses are generally not included in the Research Collection.
If the full text of an external doctoral thesis has already been published elsewhere, e.g. on a university repository, the metadata can be recorded in the Research Collection and linked to the existing publication. Such theses must be indicated in the Research Collection in the field: "ETH publication" with "No". External doctoral theses published by a publisher are recorded as monographs.
