Theses: Deposit - Faculty Office

Library Research Services home page

Guidance from Quality Handbook:

• Producing your thesis
• Submitting your thesis
• Permission to Deposit Thesis Form
• Permission to Deposit Thesis - Guidance
• Declaration of authorship form
• Submission of a Research Paper PhD Thesis: Guidance
• Intention to submit research thesis form

There are also examples of the thesis title and abstract pages in submission and completion section of the Quality Handbook. 

Data Management Plan for your PhD

Data Management Plans for Doctoral Students (Blackboard Course)

Data Management Plan guidance

For open access and institutional repository enquiries eprints@soton.ac.uk

For research data management queries please email ResearchData@soton.ac.uk

Need further help? Use our Library Research Skills support service  

This page will give you some practical guidance on how to submit your thesis to the Doctoral College Office for your faculty. Only use this route if you did not register your intention to submit in PGRManager.

• What you need to submit
• How you need to submit: using safesend
• What to do if you need to redact (remove) material
• How to ensure your thesis is an archival quality PDF

If you have any questions contact your faculty graduate school or eprints@soton.ac.uk. For thesis data queries please email ResearchData@soton.ac.uk

Following a successful viva and any corrections, you will need to submit the following files to your Graduate School admin office using Safesend (do not submit your thesis directly to the repository yourself):

• Thesis (final, post-corrections version)
  • including the University of Southampton Thesis Copyright Statement at the start
  • do not include your signature on the Thesis Declaration of Authorship Form
  • your thesis should conform to PDF/A-3 for accessibility and archiving (see how to convert your file to PDF/A-3)
  • the date on the title page should be the date of the final submission, not the viva date
  • include your ORCID on the title page of your thesis (how to register for an ORCID)
• Permission to Deposit Thesis form
  • with your signature
  • your supervisor's signature
  • your Director of Graduate School's signature (if you require an embargo).

It is your responsibility to get your supervisor's signature on your Permission to Deposit (PtD) form. This can be done va email by asking your supervisor to add an electronic signature to the PtD form word document which can be downloaded from the Quality Handbook.

If you need to place an embargo on your thesis, please read the PtD form guidance and the Library's Restricting Access To Your Thesis page and agree the embargo length with your supervisor. You will also need to ask your faculty's Head of Graduate School to countersign your form if you require an embargo.

If you need to redact (remove) material due to commercial sensitivity or third-party copyright, you should provide two copies of your thesis: one complete and one redacted, clearly marked (see below for more information).

Further information: "Submitting your Final thesis" video

Thesis Data

Unlike the thesis, datasets should be uploaded separately to Pure by you before you submit your final thesis. See the Library guide: Thesis Data Deposit for more information.

Safesend allows you to easily move files of up to 50Gb which would be too large for email. Files are automatically deleted from Dropoff 32 days after you upload them. No backups are taken of the uploaded data (it's only a transitory stopping point), so after an uploaded file has been deleted, there is no way of recovering the file.

• Go to safesend.soton.ac.uk and log in using your University username and password.
• Select Drop-off
• In the Add Recipients dialogue box, select Add Many and put in your faculty graduate school office email address, press return and add your own email address as well
  [We recommend that you add you own email address for piece of mind as you will get a copy of the email sent to your graduate school. You should hold on to this email so you can prove when you submitted your thesis should anything go wrong. We don't envisage that there will be problems, but this is the first time all staff in the University have been working remotely so we don't want to take any chances!]

• Click on Verify and close the dialogue box
• We recommend you add a short note using the box provided. It would be helpful for your administrators if you gave:
  • your name
  • student number
  • thesis title
  • supervisor's name
  • Any additional contextual information, for example if you have been unable to get some signatures
• Add your thesis files by either:
  • Drag-and-drop multiple files at once onto the drop-off page
  • Click on the Add Files button on the drop-off page, and select 1 or more files at once using combinations of click, Shift+click and Ctrl+click (Cmd+click on a Mac)
• Click on Drop-off files.

When your faculty administrators pick up your files, you will get an email from Safesend saying your files have been picked up.

Very occasionally, students need to redact (or remove) material from the publicly available version of their e-thesis. They would do this in preference to embargoing the whole thesis if the redactions did not detrimentally affect the readability and sense of the main body of the thesis. Usually this would happen when students have been unable to get permission to re-use someone else's material in their thesis that would not normally be covered by the CPDA (1998) S30 quotation for the purposes of criticism & review (see our thesis copyright guide) or, their thesis contained material that could not immediately be made public for reason of a commercial contract. Previously our advice was that students should provide two versions: a complete print version and a redacted e-thesis.

However, during the current pandemic it is not possible to deposit a complete print version. Therefore if you need to redact material from the publicly available e-thesis, you will need to deposit:

• an un-redacted, complete, version for archival purposes
• a redacted version to be made publicly available in the institutional repository

You will need to clearly mark which is the complete and which the redacted version, e.g. ANSmith-2019-thesis-COMPLETE.pdf and ANSmith-2019-thesis-REDACTED.pdf.

Further guidance: See "Submitting your final thesis" video

Your final University e-thesis must submitted in an accessible and archival format so that it will be readible in years to come, currently this format is PDF/A-3.

• Word to PDF/A-3
  The best way to ensure your PDF is accessible is to start with an accessible Word file. For more information see this iSolutions guidance on checking that your word file is accessible.
  iSolutions have created a short page which gives help and advice on how to create an accessible PDF from Word. For much more on making your thesis truly accessible read the University's Creating accessible PDFs website or play the Creating Accessible PDFs course in LinkedIn Learning. iSolutions also run training sessions on Creating a PDF/A – 3a version of your thesis for final submission to Pure
  • Mac users
    If you are using Word for Mac then start by using the Save As PDF facility. This produces a really good baseline file to continue working on in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. If for any reason you are not happy with the output as this process, then try converting the file by using Adobe Acrobat Pro's own 'Create a PDF from'. If you are still not happy with the result then contact serviceline to discuss other options.
  • PC users
    For PC users the Adobe Acrobat Pro DC facility will produce the best output. You'll find the steps below under the heading Create the PDF for PC below.
• LaTeX to PDF/A-3
  If you are using Overleaf, the automatic pdf conversion will be create a PDF/A file. Overleaf have created instructions on how to make sure your LaTeX PDF conforms to the archival standards. Please note we would prefer that you chose a-3b (propritising display) or a-3u (prioritising searchability) rather than a-1b.
  You may find the following paper helpful: Moore, R. (2014). PDF/A-3u as an Archival Format for Accessible Mathematics. In: Watt, S.M., Davenport, J.H., Sexton, A.P., Sojka, P., Urban, J. (eds) Intelligent Computer Mathematics. CICM 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8543. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08434-3_14, also available as an ArXiv pre-print.

Checking you PDF/A accessibility:
You can check how well your PDF meets the PDF/A accessibility standards using the Abode Acrobat Pro preflight checker and the accessibility checker.

How to download Abode Acrobat Pro:
Details of how to access or download Adobe Acrobat Pro DC can be found at iSolutions' How to install Adobe Acrobat DC Advice page.