Formatting and Submission of eTheses
Submitting your ethesis is quick and easy and the Leicester Research Archive team is available throughout the year to provide support and advice on all aspects relating to your electronic submission.
You should submit the final corrected version of your thesis to the Leicester Research Archive - i.e., the final version following your viva examination and after any amendments requested by the examiners have been made. You should submit your ethesis at the same time as you submit your final hard bound copy to the Graduate School Office.
Formatting Your eThesis
You should submit your ethesis as a single PDF file. Creating a PDF file is easy and can be done from almost any PC or laptop depending on the software you have used to produce your thesis:
MS Office 2007 (MS Word 2007 and MS Excel 2007)
You can easily create a PDF of your thesis from within MS Office 2007:
- Click Windows Office Button | Save As | PDF or XPS
- Click Options and check the box for ISO 19005-1 Compliant (PDF/A)
- Click Okay and then Publish
The PDF document creation process will now start.
MS Office (Pre-2007 Releases)
If you have access to Adobe Acrobat Professional then you can use this to create very high quality PDFs.
Alternatively you can install and use one of the many free PDF creation packages available online - such as PDF Online, CutePDF, PDF Forge, Jaws PDF Creator.
Other Word Processing Packages
If you are using other software to write your thesis - such as Open Office - please read the help information for your software on how to create PDF formatted documents.
Alternatively you can install and use one of the free PDF creation packages available online - see above.
LATEX
If you have used LATEX to produce your thesis, it is a simple procedure using the freeware application Ghostscript to turn a PostScript file into a PDF file.
If your thesis is composed of multiple files - such as an MS Word document and accompanying MS Excel spreadsheet - these need to be assembled into a single PDF file.
If you are unsure how to do this please contact IT Services for advice. Alternatively, you can visit the IT Help Zone in the David Wilson Library.
Submitting Your eThesis
Submitting your ethesis is easy - just email it as an attachment to the Leicester Research Archive team or use a file sending service for larger files. Alternatively, you can deliver it in person on a USB drive or DVD/CD - the Leicester Research Archive team are based in the David Wilson Library.
Before submitting your ethesis, it is important to remove any content that is covered by copyright - read more about copyright and theses.
Email Submission
If your PDF ethesis is 5Mb or smaller you can send it as an email attachment to ethesis@le.ac.uk
Please make sure to use the words "Thesis Submission" in the message subject line and include in the message your full name, your student number, and your School/Department. Please note that it is not necessary to email a copy of your ethesis to the Graduate School Office.
File Sending Services
For PDF etheses bigger than 5Mb we recommend using a file sending service to send it to ethesis@le.ac.uk The University's FileDrop can be used to send files up to 2Gb. Alternatively, there are several free file sending services available online:
- DropSend (files up to 2Gb)
- FileMail (files up to 2Gb)
- MailBigFile (files up to 300Mb)
- EmailLargeFile (files up to 200Mb)
After Submission
The Leicester Research Archive team will notify you upon receipt of your ethesis and again once it is live on the Archive. Please note that your ethesis will be added to the Archive only after the Graduate School Office has received the final bound copy of your thesis and the award of your degree has been formally confirmed.
When you submit your ethesis to the Leicester Research Archive it will automatically be added to EThOS - helping to ensure that your research is accessible to the worldwide research community.
