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How do i submit my thesis.

See our  web page  which includes contact details for our Open Access Team who can help with any queries. 

• Research Support
• Open Access
• Last Updated Nov 09, 2021
• Answered By Debs Furness

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Open Access theses

By Kirsty, on 31 March 2021

Among the many things that can be made Open Access; publications, data, software, and so many more, it is now increasingly more common for PhD theses to be made Open Access. This can be a great resource when you are undertaking your own PhD to get an idea of scope, structure and can be a great source of ideas.

Finding Open Access theses

UCL Library Services manages the DART-Europe service, the premier European portal for the discovery of open access research theses.  At the time of writing, this service provides access to over one million research theses from 564 Universities in 29 European countries.  It was founded in 2005 as a partnership of national and university libraries and consortia to improve global access to European research theses.  It does this by harvesting data from thesis repositories at contributing institutions, including from UCL Discovery (see below), and providing a link to at least one open access electronic copy of each thesis.  The theses themselves are located on the websites of the contributing institutions.

Users of the DART-Europe portal can search this vast database by keyword, or browse by country or institution, and view the research theses in full, without charge.  New theses are added every day, from doctoral and research masters programmes in every academic discipline.  For more information about the service, please contact the DART-Europe team .  Institutions not currently represented in the portal can view information on how to contribute to DART-Europe .

In normal times, the digitisation of doctoral theses can also be requested on an individual basis through the British Library’s e-theses online service (EThOS) .  This is a database of all UK doctoral theses held in university library collections, with links to open access copies in institutional repositories, and hosted directly in EThOS, where available.  If an electronic copy is not available, you can create an account with the service to request digitisation of the print copy: this prompts the institution where the thesis is held to find and check the print thesis, and then send it to the British Library’s facility at Boston Spa for digitisation.  Please note that this process incurs a charge (which is indicated during the requesting process) and is currently suspended due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Your thesis – UCL Discovery

Since the 2008-09 academic year, UCL students studying for doctoral and research master’s degrees have been required to submit an electronic copy of their thesis to the Library as a mandatory condition of the award of their degree.  Students are encouraged to make their theses openly available in UCL Discovery , our open access institutional repository, although in practice access can be restricted for a number of reasons if necessary.  A citation of the thesis appears in UCL Discovery even if access to the full text is restricted.

Older theses have also been digitised and added to UCL Discovery retrospectively.  The bulk of this work has been carried out as part of a specific project covering over 10,000 theses from 1990 to 2008.  This project is ongoing but mostly complete: over 7,000 digitised theses have been added to UCL Discovery during the last twelve months alone by Library Services staff who have not been able to carry out their normal work due to COVID-19 restrictions.

If you cannot access a UCL thesis which is listed online through these methods, please contact the Open Access Team , who will be able to provide advice on options for obtaining access.

Filed under Advocacy , UCL Discovery

Tags: Doctoral theses , open access , Thesis

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Your dissertation or research project will almost certainly require a search for literature on your topic, whether to identify selected research, to undertake a literature review or inform a full systematic review. Literature searches require planning, careful thought about what it is you wish to find out and a robust strategy to ensure you find relevant material.

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Time spent carefully planning your search can save valuable time later on and lead to more relevant results and a more robust search strategy. You should consider the following:

• Analysing your topic and understanding your research question: Carry out a scoping search to help understand your topic and to help define your question more clearly.
• What are the key concepts in your search?
• What terms might be used to describe those concepts? Consider synonyms and alternative spellings.
• If your question relates to health or clinical medicine, you might like to use PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison and Outcomes) to analyse your question:
• Combine your concept terms together using the correct operators , such as AND and OR.

See our Library Skills Essentials guide for support materials and guidance for planning your search, including understanding and defining your topic, and defining search terms.

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Make sure you are confident about using essential search techniques,  including combining search terms, phrase searching and truncation. These will help you find relevant results on your topic. See our guide to search techniques:

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• URL: https://library-guides.ucl.ac.uk/dissertations

UCL Centre for Languages & International Education (CLIE)

• Writing up your PhD thesis - One-to-one support

Writing up your PhD thesis: One-to-one support

Course information for Writing up your thesis - One-to-one support, an Academic English course for postgraduate research students at UCL

Course overview

This course is for you if you have successfully passed your upgrade/transfer and have preferably completed Introduction to Writing your PhD Thesis. One-to-one support will help you consolidate and extend your writing, with exercises and feedback on improving structure and style.

Course aims

The course aims to:

• develop awareness of the theory and conventions of academic writing
• analyse the sequence of information in essays and chapters of a PhD thesis
• encourage you to develop your writing skills through guided practice and weekly tutor feedback.

Course content

Five individual tutorials will be arranged within a period of 12 months, at times convenient to both you and your tutor. You are required to take all five tutorials within 12 months from the date you receive the email confirming your place on the course.

Tutorials may take place either online or on campus, as arranged with the course tutor.

The tutorials offer suggestions to consolidate and extend your academic writing and exercises to improve structure and style. Extracts of your work will be read and commented on for general structure.

A short section of the work may be marked in more detail for surface features (grammar, spelling, punctuation and vocabulary).

Work should be submitted to the Thesis Writing tutor at least two weeks before the tutorial. You are expected to complete the recommended follow-up exercises and to submit them together with the next piece of written work.

Writing cannot be proof-read.

Use of a Marking Code to identify errors for self-correction

Tutors using a marking code may not correct every mistake, but are likely to focus on the most important ones. When your work is returned to you, make the necessary corrections and resubmit your work.

Fees and funding

The course fee is £525.

This includes five one-hour tutorial sessions and pre/post reading and support.

Funding  is available through the Doctoral School.

Language Funding Application Deadline (OD):

• Term 1 (Friday 6 October 2023)
• Term 2 (Friday 5 January 2024)
• Term 3 (Friday 12 April 2024)

How to register

You can register through the UCL Centre for Languages & International Education (CLIE) website.

Register now

You must give 24 hours’ notice to cancel pre-arranged tutorials; otherwise the tutorial will be forfeited.

Course Feedback

All students on Academic English courses have the opportunity to give general feedback on their course to senior representatives of CLIE.

Academic support

If you have any questions about your course, please feel free to ask your tutor.

Alternatively, contact the Course Co-ordinator, Mrs Daphne Thomas:  [email protected] .

Rights and Responsibilities

CLIE seeks to ensure that all students have a positive experience in respect of courses taken here, and fully adheres to the broader rights and responsibilities policies of UCL.

As part of our responsibility, our courses will follow a logical structure consistent with delivering the content and skills practise that we advertise, but with the freedom for teachers to respond (e.g. via needs analysis at the beginning of the course) to further relevant areas of particular interest to each student group.

Problems and complaints

If you are unhappy about any aspect of your course we would advise you in the first instance to speak to a member of staff at CLIE to see if the problem can be easily resolved within the department. For further details of our formal complaints procedure, please email the Academic English Course Coordinator or administration team at  [email protected] .

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Academic Communication support is available for Master's and undergraduate students through the UCL Academic Communication Centre . 

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International Student Support : key information and advice on how best to prepare, settle in and enjoy life in the UK.

[email protected]

+44 (0)20 8138 7872

Thesis Template for University College London

UCL Thesis LaTeX Template © Ian Kirker, 2014

This is a template/skeleton for PhD/MPhil/MRes theses. It uses a rather split-up file structure because this tends to work well for large, complex documents. We suggest using one file per chapter, but you may wish to use more or fewer separate files than that. We've also separated out various bits of configuration into their own files, to keep everything neat.

Downloaded from https://github.com/UCL/ucl-latex-thesis-templates

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DIAL.mem : UCLouvain Electronic Master theses

DIAL.mem is the institutional repository for the Master theses of the UCLouvain. It aims at archiving a digital copy of all successful Master theses. Access to those copies is given where both the student and the institution have approved it. DIAL.mem is part of DIAL “Digital Access to Libraries” – the gateway to the electronic resources of the UCLouvain Libraries.

Digital preservation and use of Master theses entail many advantages for their authors, the users, and the university:

• Greater promotion and 24/7 accessibility
• Direct and unique access for both the text and the appendices (in whatever file format)
• Advanced research options, including on the full text
• Environmental benefits and saving in stack spaces
• Struggle against plagiarism

In 2020-2021, all faculties participate in the digital filing of Master theses in DIAL.mem.

For an exact list, click on "All theses" and look at the "Degree" filter located on the left side of the screen.

More information on the contents and functionalities of DIAL.mem can be found in the FAQ (French only).

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