Theses: Deposit - PGR Manager & Pure

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 you thesis and thesis data into Pure, the system that sits behind out Institutional Repository..

• What you need to deposit
• 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

Please allow up to two working weeks for your thesis to be processed by the Library.

Following a successful viva and any corrections, you will need to submit the following your thesis to PGR Manager. Please follow the PGRManager guidance on final thesis submission. 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. The Faculty Head of Graduate School will need to approve your embargo.

When your examiners have signed off your corrections and your supervisor and Faculty Director of Graduate School (if necessary) have agreed the embargo, you need to create a thesis record in Pure (N.B. you must be on campus/VPN to login). For specific guidance on how to fill in your Pure record see: Pure thesis deposit guide.

You need to upload:

• Thesis (final, post-corrections version)
  • include 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 below for more information)
  • 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)
• Second copy of your thesis if you need to redact (remove) material due to commercial sensitivity or third-party copyright, in which case you should provide two copies of your thesis: one complete and one redacted, clearly marked (see below for more information).

The Library will then check the thesis PDF file and get back to you if there are any issues.

Thesis Data: Unlike the thesis, you can upload datasets to Pure and be assigned a DOI before you submit your final thesis. See the Library guide: Thesis Data Deposit for more information. When depositing your thesis, you can link to the two records together.

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, as the University is moving towards removing the requirement for a print copy, 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 archived by the Library.

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.