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In this section, you will find some useful tips for writing your thesis.

For more information on electronic deposition of your thesis click here

Electronic Deposition

Applicable to doctoral researchers registered on or after 1 October 2012.

For doctoral researchers at the University of Reading, it is now a requirement that an electronic copy of your thesis be deposited via an approved, secure method. This page answers some of the questions you may have about this process. In addition, there is a more detailed training module on Blackboard (see below) to help you understand the process better.

• What is electronic deposition?

Electronic deposition is one element of the process of thesis submission for the large majority of doctoral researchers at Reading; it is a requirement for students on relevant programmes who enrolled on or after 1 October 2012. You will be required to deposit an electronic copy of the final version of your thesis into the University’s digital Institutional Repository, CentAUR.

According to the web-page above there is a compulsory training module (‘Creating your electronic thesis’) available via Blackboard (for which you should be enrolled) to help you prepare for electronic deposition.

The course is easy to do and takes roughly 20 minutes to read through with a 10 question assignment at the end. It’s well worth completing.

Copyright

Copyright is now a big issue for the University because of the electronic submission and online access to your thesis.

To avoid copyright issues, you now need to ask permission for EVERY figure you use (even if it is your) from the journal that they appear. The course above details how you should go about doing this and provides you with a great template for your letter if you are not sure what you should say. To find the course you need to login to Blackboard, the course should be visible under ‘Courses where you are: Student’. The technical title for the module is just ‘RDXCRETHES-14-5SH: Creating your electronic thesis’. If you do not see it in the list, then you need to contact Chris Robson (c.robson@reading.ac.uk) and he will make sureyou are properly registered for the course.

This is a compulsory course and well worth the time to save on having copyright issues when you submit your thesis.

Do not panic if the journal: 1) does not get back to you, 2) does not give you permission, or 3) says you can use the figure but for a fee. The university says that we shouldn’t have to pay for figures so do not take them up on that offer. If you experience these problems, then all you have to do is tick the ‘not available online’ box when you submit. This will not affect your mark. Ideally try and get the permissions and make sure you reference the permission in the figure caption and keep all correspondence with the journals so that you are covered for any future problems that may arise.