I recently concluded my PhD, and I am wondering if I should make my thesis widely available (for free) over the internet.

I am thinking on uploading it to www.scribd.com, so people can get easy access to it. What is your opinion? What are the risks (e.g. plagiarism?), advantages and drawbacks of doing this?

Many thanks for your comments

I definately wouldn't do this until I had published eveyrthing I wanted to get published. Not only will plagarism be a complete pain, but also, if you want to publish your work, some journals may get picky about it being online already. It will also mean that anyone out there can replicate it and get it published before you (because you will be in a post-viva haze).

It should be available for free on Ethos (most universities have agreed to open access).

If you plan to publish any of your work, you'll come up against copyright issues if your thesis has been uploaded on a freebie site.

I'd wait a couple of years first.

You can also upload your PhD thesis on ResearchUSA.org (Documents Archive) and set the permission according to your wish. If you have published all your journal papers out of your PhD research, you can upload the entire thesis there and make it public. If you want to share this PhD thesis only among collaborators, then upload the whole thesis there but make it private (you will be able to put a password - you have to email the password to anyone you want to have a look at your thesis - example - employers, post doc recruiters etc) . If you are still publishing journal papers from your PhD thesis, then you can upload a limited preview of your thesis at ResearchUSA. Just put the first 50 pages of your thesis there (Possibly contains Table of content, Literature review, background work etc, but not any results). I think this is a good idea because it improves the visibility of your research yet does not compromise the safety of your ownership. Also this portal connects your work to your CV so that people coming to your work through google search etc also get to see your CV. I personally like this website a lot. Scribd is also good but i am not sure if it is very research centric.

To be honest, I'm with the others in NOT making your PhD available online. Legally, your PhD does not count as a publication and whilst that frees your from copyright isues in using other people's diagram in your thesis, it also means that you have no copyright over the content of your thesis, so I wouldn't bother until after you've juiced your PhD with proper publications.