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 who will sign the Thesis Declaration Form.

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 librarians need need to check after we have been passed your thesis after it has been examined,  and before you can introduce your thesis to the world.  Once the Post Graduate Office have done all the work they need to do, it's sent 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 may not be 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 publically 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.  We used to when it had less information on it, but no longer.

Anton Angelo

Phone: +6433693901

Conditions under which theses may be used

Digital copy of a theses are protected by the Copyright Act 1994 (New Zealand). It may be consulted by you provided you undertake to comply with the provisions of the Act and the following conditions of use:

• You will use the copy only for the purposes of research or private study
• You will recognize the author's right to be identified as the author of the thesis and due acknowledgement will be made to the author where appropriate
• You will obtain the author's permission before publishing any material from the thesis

General copyright and disclaimer

In addition to the above conditions, your use of theses is conditional on you reading, and agreeing to, the information and requirements outlined on the University's Legal Information web page.