Couple of years ago they introduced the "by prior publication" (which we call it sandwich thesis in Canada) to my university but it did not get popular... I think the idea was something like if you have published 3 papers in journals as first author from the research you'd done through your PhD, then you could bundle them together and present it as a PhD. There are some limits to that... most importantly how do you judge the journal... can the students just publish in any journal or it should be specific journals with certain impact factor? and what if they are published? just because they are published, does it mean that they can award the student with PhD and so on... In addition for good journals in my field, the waiting time for a paper to be published can be a year or more so how would that waiting time would be better than the 6 months writing period?

I thought the British 3-4 years PhD model was short but do they want to make it shorter than this??!!

Frankly speaking I do not understand the rush for sending students out in a market that cannot absorb them. If this is a kind of "cost/benefit" analysis that university are doing to maximize profit of the student flow in-put and shorten the time they stay in, they should not admit too many students in the first place. The universities shall not be run like business.

Yeah there's quite a few things in the article I don't agree with. Personally I think the UK thesis format is good for several reasons. For example, you can include negative results, you have more time to discuss the literature, you can write some more outlandish ideas that you wouldn't be able to mention in paper, you can write detailed methods that people can replicate since it's often hard to replicate stuff from methods in a paper and it's a good skill to be able to write such a long piece of work. Plus, once you've done it, it's much easier to condense it in to a paper, because you already have all the information you need.

Personally I'd support a change in format. I spent nearly a year writing a long drawn out thesis that hardly anyone will ever read. Biggest mistake I made was seeing my project as a single thing rather than breaking it down at the start into a series of papers. I passed my Phd and have been working as a postdoc, but I've only published a small portion of my Phd data. In terms of working in academia people ultimately need to turn research into papers, so why not learn to do that to gain a phd?

Guess it's different for everyone. Mine is three chapters, three papers, so it's not much additional work for conversion, but I do see your point. Plus, I've published one paper during PhD so I've also learnt how to write papers.

Here in Austria, there is the possibility (in life sciences/medicine) to achieve your phD by publishing one to two first author papers in a peer reviewed journal (at the time of defense both must be at least have the status accepted with revisions). It doesn't shorten the phD itself (3 years mininmum) - contrary it strengthens your position at the defense since you have already produced "new" knowledge. Hence, its nearly impossible to dismiss your thesis because of lack of contribution to the field which is the danger when doing "only" a monographie;-).

Most people that I know of aim for the (at our university) two papers amd add then a conceptual framework to make a nice "story" out of it. Such cumulative dissertations can be as short as 50-70 pages.

As far as i know, its possible that one of the papers is a review - I have no idea if a short communication would count, too. Thats depends on the head of the research team at the given university.