Theses: Covid-19

Library Research Services home page

Guidance from Quality Handbook:

• Producing your thesis
• Submitting your thesis
• Additional submission guidance during Covid-19
• 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 you thesis remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic.

• What you need to submit
• How you need to submit: using safesend
• What to do if you need to redact (remove) material
• Submitting your thesis remotely - copy of Extraordinary Quality Handbook guidance

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
• 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.

The complete version will not be available for download from the repository and will be used for the Library to produced a print, archival copy when the pandemic is over.

Further guidance: See "Submitting your final thesis" video

Copy of the guidance in the Extraordinary Quality Handbook for final thesis submission (entry dated 20th March)

PGR thesis submission requirements/permission to deposit - approved by Chair of AQSC 19 March 2020.

Submission of thesis for examination

• The requirement that students must submit both soft-bound and electronic copies of their thesis for examination is suspended.  Instead, students are required to submit a single electronic copy via the relevant Faculty Graduate School Office email address. The Faculty Graduate School will ensure this copy is sent to examiners prior to the viva voce.
• The Declaration of Authorship forms will be signed by students electronically.
• Physical copies of the thesis will not be printed by Faculty Graduate School Offices for use by examiners.

Submission of the final thesis

• Students must continue to adhere to the requirements of the Permission to Deposit Thesis Guidance, however the requirement that students must submit both soft-bound and electronic copies of their final thesis has been temporarily suspended.  Instead, students will be required to submit a single electronic copy of their final thesis and the Permission to Deposit Thesis Form.
• The required signatures (student, main supervisor and, where appropriate, Faculty Director of the Graduate School) should be sought and entered electronically onto the Permission to Deposit Form.
• That students should submit their final thesis and the Permission to Deposit Thesis Form electronically using Safesend (addressed to the Faculty Graduate School Office’s generic email address).  Safesend is a service to make it easy to move files, including large files up to 50.0 GB, in and out of the University.  Students will automatically get an email receipt to confirm that their submission has been picked up by the Faculty Graduate School Office, however it is recommended that students also copy their own email address in to the submission to provide added reassurance that the submission has been made (as files are automatically deleted from SafeSend 32 days after upload).
• The Faculty Graduate School Office will upload the electronic copy of the final thesis and the Permission to Deposit Form to Pure where it will be validated by the Library.
• At a future date, the University will take responsibility for printing and binding the final theses which have been submitted to the Library for long term storage.