5.10 Final Submission of Your Thesis
If you have been awarded your degree without amendments being needed, or you have made any amendments needed and your internal examiner has confirmed these have been done satisfactorily, you need to prepare and submit the final version of your thesis. This should be done promptly - the conferral of your degree may be delayed until the final hard bound copy of your thesis has been received.
For your final submission, you are required to submit one hard bound copy of your thesis to the Graduate School Office together with a completed author consent form.
Additionally, you are required to submit an electronic copy of your thesis to the Leicester Research Archive.
Binding Your Thesis
For the hard bound copy, the cover should be Standard Green – Arbelave Library Buckram No. 563. The front and back covers should be blank while the spine should have your name, thesis title (abbreviated to fit if necessary), degree, and year of first submission in gold lettering.
Submitting Your eThesis
Since 2008 all University of Leicester postgraduate researchers have been required to submit an electronic copy of their thesis in addition to the hard bound printed copy. The electronic copy of the thesis is often referred to as an ethesis.
Benefits of Electronic Thesis Submission
Your ethesis is added to two digital research archives - the University's own Leicester Research Archive and the national Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS).
Etheses are much more accessible than printed theses - adding your thesis to the Leicester Research Archive means that it will be accessible to the worldwide research community and significantly improve the chances that your work will be viewed, consulted, and cited. So having your thesis available electronically massively increases its visibility and increasing the visibility of your work also increases your visibility as a researcher – something that is particularly important as you look to take your first steps into your career beyond your degree.
Pre-Publication Concerns
Making your thesis available electronically through the Leicester Research Archive constitutes a form of publication. As such it can be a cause for concern for those students who are considering how to publish their work elsewhere - either as a book or journal article(s) - as some editors/publishers will not accept work that has already been published.
First of all it needs to be remembered that electronic submission is a requirement of all postgraduate researchers - there are no exceptions from that requirement.
Moreover, it is by no means certain that adding your thesis to the Leicester Research Archive will harm your chances of publishing the work by another route. Indeed, research has found that submitting a thesis to an online repository such as the Leicester Research Archive rarely precludes subsequent use of the material in another form.
Where there adding your thesis to the Leicester Research Archive/EThOS would cause problems, an embargo can be requested.
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