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PhD thesis and open access

In order to enhance and disseminate the doctoral theses discussed by the students of IMT School, the Library manages the open archive E-Theses.

E-Theses includes all bibliographic information of discussed theses and, in most cases, fulltext access too. Starting from 2016 all the theses are deposited in open access version, at latest in 36 months (embargo).

The archive complies with the international interoperability standards OAI-PMH (Open Access Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) and for this reason the theses are indexed by most search engines.

Archived theses are subject to legal deposit at the Central National Library of Florence and are uniquely identified by the Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

  • Why open access for theses?
    The accessibility to fulltext of the doctoral thesis increases the dissemination and the impact of your research work, without compromise a future publication. Moreover, although it is very difficult to prevent any plagiarism, it is still much easier to identify them if the thesis is available online.
  • What rights you have on your theses?
    As the author of the thesis, you own the non-transferable moral rights (authorship, integrity and withdrawal of the work from the trade) and the rights of economic or patrimonial utilization (distribution, communication, reproduction, translation, etc.), which instead can be transferred, partly or exclusively. The PhD Thesis Commitment form, which you will sign when submitting your thesis, is a non-exclusive license: you mantain your rights and authorize IMT School the to distribute the thesis online (within the limits of embargo). You can still publish your thesis or distribute it on other channels.
  • Parts already published can be included in the thesis?
    If you have already published some parts of your thesis with a publisher, you probably gave your economic rights to the publisher and can no longer use your work or distribute it. We therefore advise you to check the clauses of the contract signed with the publisher. If you have transferred all the rights, your publication can not be inserted into the thesis in the same published version. In this case you can:
    1. change the form of the publication (if you have transferred the economic rights only for a particular form style);
    2. insert a list of the works you have published on the basis of your research, with all the bibliographic references and eventually the links that lead to the electronic version. You can then deliver to the examining commission printed copies of these publications, attached to the thesis but not bound with it;
    3. ask the authorization to the publisher to insert the article in your thesis.

Useful documents (in Italian):