This guide brings together information about Open Access Resources and Open Educational Resources. It aims to make Open Access resources easier to find and use for study, teaching and research.
Edinburgh Research Archive - Full text electronic copies of most University of Edinburgh PhD theses can be found online in the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA). The collection comprises 23,500 items and includes MD theses from the 1700s through to PhDs recently awarded in 2020.
EThoS: e-theses online service - This service from the British Library aims to provide a national aggregated record of all doctoral theses awarded by UK Higher Education institutions, and free access to the full text of as many theses as possible for use by researchers.
If you know the details of the thesis you wish to consult then an effective way to find the full text is via Google Scholar. Search for the full title in quotes, followed by the author last name, and/or date if known.
DART-Europe is a searchable database of electronic research theses held in European repositories. It covers around 586 Universities in 29 European countries.
EBSCO Open Dissertations is a free database with records for more than 1.4 million electronic theses and dissertations from more than 320 universities around the world.
Global ETD Search from the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) contains around 6 million records, the majority of which are open, but some may not be publicly available.
Open Access Theses & Dissertations currently indexes around 5 million open access theses and dissertations from 1100 institutions worldwide.
Theses and dissertations from the University of Edinburgh are published online in the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA). In 2020, UoE theses were downloaded 829,804 times from ERA (source IRUS-UK download report). The University has an expectation that a PhD thesis is a document available for public consultation. As such, unless a legitimate reason for restricting access to the thesis exists, all PhD theses will be made publicly available on the internet. Masters dissertations are not routinely made available online, but exceptional dissertations can be made open access.
Only Masters Dissertations from the School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences and the School of Geosciences are routinely deposited in the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA). If you are from a different School you can make your master dissertation open access by depositing in ERA. You can do this by logging in with your EASE credentials, then selecting your Schools Thesis & Dissertation Collection and follow the prompts for submitting a new item to the collection.
