Terms
Version of 28 October 2026. In these terms, “we” is the operator of Doctoral at doctoral.edwardthomas.quest, and “you” is the author submitting a thesis.
1. What Doctoral is
Doctoral hosts doctoral theses on public web pages. It is a publication and hosting service. It is not a journal, it does not peer review, it does not award or certify degrees, and it does not replace any deposit your institution requires. We check only that the file is a complete PDF that matches the details you gave.
2. The fee
The publication fee is a single payment of US $500, taken when you submit. It covers hosting your thesis page and PDF, its citation metadata and its place in the library, with no yearly charge. Card payments are handled by Stripe; we never see your card details.
If we decline to publish your thesis, we refund the fee in full. You may withdraw before publication for a full refund. Once your thesis is published the fee is not refunded, but you may still ask us to remove it (section 6).
3. Marketing
Marketing is optional. If you ask for a quote, we send you a written estimate of what the work would cost us. Marketing is charged at what it costs us. We spend nothing and charge nothing for marketing unless you approve the quote in writing.
4. Your rights and our licence
You keep the copyright in your thesis. You give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, display and distribute the thesis and its details on Doctoral, to share its metadata with search engines and indexes, and to make the copies needed to keep it online and backed up. You may publish the thesis anywhere else.
5. What you promise
- You are the author and have the right to publish the thesis.
- Material owned by others is used with permission, or lawfully.
- The thesis contains no confidential information, and no personal data about other people that you lack consent to publish.
- You have checked your institution’s and any funder’s or publisher’s rules about publishing the thesis here.
6. Removal
You can ask us to remove your thesis at any time, and we will take down its page and PDF. We may decline or remove a thesis that breaks section 5 or the law; if that happens before publication, we refund the fee. Search engines and others may keep their own copies for a while after removal; we cannot control that.
7. Keeping it online
We intend to keep published theses online indefinitely. If we ever close Doctoral, we will give at least 90 days’ notice and offer you a copy of your files.
8. Your information
Your name, thesis title, institution, degree, year, abstract, keywords, discipline and supervisor are published with the thesis. Your email address is used only to deal with your submission and is never published. We do not sell personal information.
9. Limits
We provide the service as described and do not promise that any search engine will index your thesis, how it will rank, or how many people will read it. To the extent the law allows, our liability to you is limited to the fee you paid.