How to Deposit your Doctoral Thesis

General

All dissertations and postdoctoral theses produced at TU Dortmund University must be submitted to the Section Information Skills and Publication Support. To comply with the legal deposit and publication regulations, you have to hand in deposit copies of your doctoral thesis after the oral examination. To submit your documents, please make an appointment. If you want to send your thesis by mail please contact us in advance.

Publication regulations and legal deposit regulations are set down in the doctoral regulations (Promotionsordnungen) of the departments. The number of deposit copies stipulated in the doctoral regulations varies depending on the publication form. The doctoral regulations are available at the Dean's Office (Dekanat) of your department or online on our Eldorado document repository.

After you have submitted your deposit copies, we will send a receipt to the Dean's Office (Dekanat) / doctoral commission (Promotionsausschuss). On receipt of our confirmation, the department will issue your doctoral diploma.

Printed Theses 

One copy of your thesis will be shelved at the Central Library. We also send two deposit copies to the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek) in Leipzig unless the publisher has already submitted the dissertation or this is unnecessary in case of an electronic publication. (in accordance with the Statutes of the German National Library and its Legal Deposit Directive). Other copies will be used for book exchanges with other university libraries.
If your thesis is published with a publishing company, you have to provide written confirmation by your publisher confirming the required minimum edition size of usually 150 copies. Please also inform us about the date of your oral exam, as we need it in order to issue a written confirmation that you have handed in your doctoral thesis. To create a complete catalog entry, your year of birth and a subject-related professional title, like mathematician, psychologist are required.

Electronic Theses 

All doctoral regulations (Promotionsordnungen) of TU Dortmund University allow for an electronic publication of doctoral theses.

What we need for the electronic publication of your thesis

• The required number of print copies specified in the doctoral regulations (Promotionsordnung), usually three copies, no comb binding, please!
• The electronic version of your thesis in PDF/A format, which needs to be identical to the printed version to ensure citability. You can send the electronic version as an attachment to an email to the Section Information Skills and Publication Support or via our Cloud-Service Sciebo ("Handout for using Sciebo"). No USB sticks please!
• A short abstract (electronic version in Word or text editor format, approximately half a page (A4)).
• The submission form, filled in and signed.
• The affidavit may be included in the thesis, but please be sure to refrain from signing it, especially in the electronic version, due to possible misuse.
• Please refrain from using an electronic password in your pdf document and do not include a CV in your thesis.
• To create a complete catalog entry, your year of birth and a subject-related professional title, like mathematician, psychologist are required.

What happens after you have deposited your thesis

• After you have handed in all of the above, we will send a receipt to the Dean's Office (Dekanat) / doctoral commission (Promotionsausschuss). On receipt of our confirmation, the department will issue your doctoral diploma. Your thesis will be uploaded to Eldorado and will receive a persistent URL (handle) as well as a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), which will be created shortly afterwards. We will send you an email once the DOI has been created so that you can use it to cite your thesis.
• Your thesis will be listed in our library catalog and we will register it with the German National Library. Electronic theses are listed in the German National Bibliography Series H. Your thesis is thus retrievable online and accessible in full text through the German National Library online catalog.

Theses by published works ("kumulative Dissertation") 

Some departments of TU Dortmund University accept theses by published works (so-called "kumulative Dissertationen"). Theses by published works usually consist of several articles on related topics, which have been published in academic journals, and introductory and concluding texts connecting the individual papers. The articles may have been published already or may have been submitted to a publisher. This entails specific questions of copyright, which usually are answered in the publishing contract or on the publisher's website. We will be happy to advise you on this kind of publication and its requirements.