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Thesis Guide: Home

Deposit your Thesis

Restrictions On The Use Of Your Thesis

The Thesis Declaration Form that is completed and signed as part of the submission process (see the Postgraduate Studies website) outlines the conditions around the use of your thesis (consultation and copying) once it has been added to the UC Research Repository.

If you intend to publish part of your thesis material, you may feel obliged to place some limitations upon its use. If this is the case, you should seek the approval of your supervisor who must also sign the form. Consult the Thesis Availability Policy for guidelines. Intention to embargo must be indicated on the Thesis Declaration Form.

Any restrictions must be approved by the Dean of Postgraduate Studies and the University Librarian, who will also need to sign the Thesis Declaration Form.

What Happens After Your Thesis is Submitted

Firstly: congratulations!  That was a lot of work.  We’re proud of you, your mum’s proud of you, and the rest of the world is quite interested to see what contribution you have made to the sum total of the world’s knowledge.

Secondly: there are one or two things we need to check before you can introduce your thesis to the world.  Once you have sent your final work to the postgraduate office, they send it to the Library, along with the Thesis Declaration Form you and your supervisor have signed.  The library then checks your work to make sure it conforms to copyright law.  If there are anything other than simple issues, we’ll get back to you to see how we can resolve them.  The most common problem is including journal articles you have written, which may be needed for marking, but we are not allowed to make available online.  In this case, we replace the article with a link to the publisher’s version of it.

Once copyright checking has been done, we send it to the cataloguers, who add key words and special research vocabulary terms to the UC catalogue record, and do the final work to make the work available on the UC Research Repository.

Once it is publicly available, the information about your thesis is gathered by Google Scholar, OCLC (a worldwide library catalogue of library catalogues) and the NZ National Library through http://nzresearch.org.nz – a fantastic resource of all New Zealand’s openly accessible research.

We don’t make the new Thesis Declaration Form available, as it has your permanent email address on it, as well as other potentially private information. 

Embargoes and Sensitive Theses

Embargoes are temporary restrictions of the ability to download a thesis.  Usually there is a maximum of 24 months after the library gets the work, usually in order to make sure publishers don’t consider having your research available in a thesis is a reason not to publish a paper on the same work.  Embargoes have to be agreed to by you, your supervisor, the Dean of Post-Graduate Studies and the University Librarian.

Please note that embargoed theses have their title and author information available to the public during the embargo, but the files and the abstract are not available. 

Does your publisher mind if your thesis is available when you submit an article to them?  Probably not.  In fact, having your thesis available without an embargo on the UC research repository can improve your chances of publishing.  MIT keep a list of publisher policies on whether they will demand an embargo on your thesis, but they are quite rare.

If your work is very sensitive - maybe it contains intellectual property from a commercial organisation, or you have signed a non-disclosure agreement, or it has any other sensitive information - please get in touch with us at ucresearchrepository@canterbury.ac.nz and we can help organise storing it in an appropriate and secure way.   We’d like to see any documents relating to that, as it helps us make sure we are protecting everyone’s information.

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