Introduced in 2014, Open Scholarship is the University of Washington in St. Louis' institutional repository, where theses and dissertations are submitted electronically (ETDs). Open Scholarship contains over 4,000 ETDs across a variety of disciplines at WashU, making their students' work easier to find by Google, Google Scholar, and many other search engines. 

As institutional repositories increased in popularity across the academic landscape, the need for print theses and dissertations has declined overtime. As a result, theses and dissertations are no longer available in print format at many institutions, including WashU. There are many graduate programs at WashU that require students to submit their thesis or dissertation. This requirement varies across programs, so please consult your advisor or designated point of contact within your program to confirm what the requirements are. If you are not required to deposit your thesis and want to deposit your work, no problem! We encourage any students who want to share their scholarship to deposit. 

Theses are submitted directly to Open Scholarship via an electronic submission form and dissertations are submitted to ProQuest. ProQuest is an information platform that provides users, on an international scale, access to dissertations and other forms of scholarship from all over the world. While WashU requires dissertations to be submitted via ProQuest, not all institutions have the same submission requirements.

For questions about Open Scholarship, please contact digital@wumail.wustl.edu.

The Open Scholarship Homepage

Why Institutional Repositories Are Important