<p>While the primary purpose of a doctoral thesis is to demonstrate research competence within a given academic context, particularly in systems like the French one, it remains valuable for the work to circulate beyond a narrow circle of examiners—especially when only a small portion of the thesis is later translated into international journal articles. For that to happen, writing in English and ensuring online accessibility are often key contributing factors to broader international visibility and usability. In France, significant progress has been made on both fronts over the past fifteen years, notably with the expansion of the open-access repository <i>theses.fr</i>. Drawing on metadata from nearly half a million doctoral dissertations archived in this platform, we examined the evolution of dissemination practices across a range of academic disciplines. In France, doctoral graduates in the hard sciences were not always more likely to share their dissertations online than those in fields such as the social sciences and humanities. Nonetheless, the disciplinary gap was much more pronounced when it came to the use of English, which clearly favored disciplines like life sciences, mathematics or informatics, which are aligned with international publication norms. At the same time, the analysis revealed substantial inter-institutional variability, particularly in open-access practices, suggesting that local policies, infrastructures, and supervisory cultures play a decisive role in shaping how these broader trends are implemented across universities. These trends can be interpreted through the lens of evolving academic literacies, which increasingly incorporate not only the mastery of disciplinary knowledge but also the ability to navigate emerging norms of international visibility, open access dissemination, and linguistic practices shaped by globalization.</p>