How to submit the final version of your PhD thesis

The University has an expectation that a PhD thesis is a document available for public consultation. As such, unless a legitimate reason for restricting access to the thesis exists, all PhD theses will be made publicly available on the internet via the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA).

It is highly recommended that you discuss with your primary supervisor the implications of publishing your thesis online in ERA. If your thesis contains confidential or sensitive data it may not be appropriate to make the full text freely available online. Similarly if there is the intention to publish the whole, or extracts from, your thesis you may want to restrict access to the electronic version.

1. Go to Pure and log in with your EASE account
2. Click on the green ‘Add new’ button on the top right and select ‘Doctoral Thesis’, or alternatively click on ‘Student theses’ on the left-hand-side navigation bar followed by ‘Doctoral Thesis’
3. The record should be auto-populated with most of your thesis award information. Please check for completeness, and add in the title of your thesis in the appropriate box.
4. Upload your electronic thesis files by clicking on the ‘Add document’ button. If you require an embargo for the PDF add the date and reason in the appropriate boxes. The initial embargo length is one year from date of graduation. The date will be checked by Library staff and changed if a different value is added without permission.
5. Please remove any signatures, personal postal and email addresses from the PDF version.
6. Upload your Access to Thesis form alongside your thesis files.
7. Supplementary data can be added alongside the thesis text. Change the ‘Type’ to ‘Supplementary materials’ and upload the files as described above. The record Visibility needs to be set to 'Backend - Restricted to Pure users' 
8. To finish, set the status to 'Entry in progress', click the blue ‘Save’ button at the bottom of the screen and the submission is ready for validation by college office staff.

If your thesis has supplementary data (for example images, videos, source code or analytical data) we would like to store a copy of this data alongside the thesis text. We do this to try and preserve the fullest record of the work as possible. Datasets should be supported by good accompanying documentation which is appropriate to your subject discipline. The UK Data Archive (UKDA) offers some specialist advice in this area. We do not routinely allow public access to this data; however, if you wish to share your data with others we recommend the Edinburgh DataShare service.

You can restrict access to the electronic version of your thesis for one year without any special permissions. However, should you need the electronic embargo to be longer than one year then this must be negotiated with the Library by speaking with the Scholarly Communications Team using the contact details below.

Restricting access to the hard copy is not routinely allowed and requires special permission from your Head of School. This can be requested by filling in page 2 of the ‘Access to Thesis’ form which can be found on this page:

Doctoral thesis submission