Content which cannot be published

The final copy of your thesis which you submit for academic assessment can contain any kind of information. This 'full' copy must be deposited with the library. However, if this copy contains any kind of information that cannot be published (see below) you must also create and deposit a redacted copy, which can be shared.

Any documents you deposit which cannot be shared will be stored securely in Pure but not made publicly available. Please ensure that your redacted version has REDACTED at the beginning of the file name so that it is clear which version is which. 

Examples of information which cannot be published

  • People’s personal details such as names or addresses
  • Content which belongs to someone else and which you do not have the right to publish e.g. data which you have paid to access under the condition that you do not share it
  • Your signature on the Author's Declaration page

Where there is commercially sensitive content, including if you wish to make a patent application, or if you wish to have more time to prepare for publication, or if there is another reason to delay public release, you may wish to request a full deferral or to redact specific parts of your dissertation. It is important that you request to defer or to redact if you wish to hold back your dissertation in full or in part for a period of time.

What if my thesis does contain information which cannot be published?

The simplest thing to do it to remove the information after your thesis has been submitted for academic assessment. You should signify where information has been removed by replacing it with the word ‘Redacted’. You may also wish to give further information, such as the reason for the redaction. Other options will depend on the type of information you’re dealing with. You should replace content with a text box of the same size to retain page ordering.

Document layout with placeholder text, a small party photo, and a box stating “Photograph removed due to permissions issue.”

Image Franz & P CC BY 2.0

If your thesis contains information about living people, and you believe that removing the information entirely would devalue your thesis, you could explore other options, such as pseudonymisation or the aggregation of variables. For further information see: Anonymisation: managing data protection risk code of practice

If information cannot be published because you do not have the permissions necessary to do so, you could seek permission from the rights holder. The most common example of this is material which is in copyright. We provide a separate guide to copyright and theses .

If your thesis contains information which cannot be published straight away but could be published at some future date, such as information to support a commercial patent, you can request a deferral of access. This is a finite delay to publication. To request a deferral contact your supervisor, please see Deferring access to your thesis.

The final option is to request your thesis not be published as an Open Access document at all. Requests of this nature will be considered on a case by case basis through the deferral process. To request an exemption from publication you will need to contact your supervisor at the earliest opportunity.

Further guidance on identifiable information 

It’s very unlikely that your thesis will contain the personal details of living people but if it does then these must be removed before it can be published. This is the law, as set out in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The exception is when a person has given you written consent to identify them in your publication.

Direct identifiers such as names and addresses are easy to spot but your thesis should not contain sufficient indirect identifiers (such as age or postcode) which, when taken together with other readily available information, might allow a person to be identified. For example, your research might have involved a person with a rare genetic disorder. If you also gave the city in which your research took place, readers might then have enough information to identify the individual, without the need for a name. For more information see the Sensitive data bootcamp.

If your thesis contains images of people who are recognisable, you would normally need written permission from the people in the photographs before you can publish them, for example by using a photography consent form. An exception is when you have a photograph of people going about their everyday business in a public place where they could reasonably expect to be photographed. For example, shoppers walking in a high street.

Your thesis should not contain your own personal details, including your signature. This is partly a security risk but also because your contact details are likely to change. If you wish to provide readers with your contact details, you should restrict these to your UoB email address. This will continue to function even after you’ve graduated.

The General Data Protection Regulation only applies to information about living people. However, while it is not illegal to share data which identifies deceased persons, there may be other reasons for not doing so. For example, involving ethnic or political sensitivities.

Author's Declaration page

You do not need to insert an electronic version of your signature into the Author's Declaration page when you submit your thesis to the library. For security, please leave this page unsigned.

You are required by law to remove the identifiable personal details of living people (‘Personal Data’) from your thesis before it can be shared publicly.

The relevant Data Protection Legislation is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018. The only exception is when you have a record of a person’s consent to identify them in the public version.

Data you must remove or anonymise can include ‘direct’ (names and addresses) or ‘indirect’ identifiers (information which when combined permits identification). See our guidance on Personal data & scholarly publications (forthcoming) for more information.  

Anonymisation

Effective anonymisation approaches may be appropriate in your research practice and mean data is anonymised even in the examination copy of your thesis.

  • You must carefully consider how you will handle Personal Data at an early stage in your research process.
  • Consider what approach to use and how to do this ethically using the Information Commissioner Office’s Guidance on Anonymisation.
  • You should talk to your supervisor about the approaches you plan to take.
  • If you choose to include identifiable data in your examination copy, you must create a modified version for public access at the time of deposit.
  • This may mean redacting certain sections which present the identifiable data. Guidance on redactions is further below on this webpage.
  • If the identifiable data represents a significant portion of your thesis or is widespread and minor redactions would not be reasonable, consider requesting approval for substantial redactions via the deferral process.

For more information on sensitive data and best practice, see the Sensitive data bootcamp.

Photographs of people 

If your thesis contains images of people who are recognisable, you will normally need written permission (consent) from the people in the photographs before you can publish them.

  • Consult the University’s Research Ethics webpages for guidance and templates.
  • Photographs of people going about their everyday business in a public place (where they could reasonably expect to be photographed) may not always require their permission to be reproduced, e.g.  shoppers walking in a high street.
  • Blurring features to reduce the risk of re-identification may be appropriate, but this does not always replace the need for consent.

The Data Protection Legislation only applies to information about living people. While it is not illegal to share data which identifies deceased persons, there may be other reasons for not doing so; for example, spiritual, cultural, or political sensitivities.

If you wish to include materials that someone else has created, you need to have the permission to do so. The rights of a creator to restrict the reproduction of their work is governed by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (the CDPA).

  • You should identify who holds the copyright on the materials you wish to reproduce in your thesis.
  • Once you have decided to include third party material, don’t wait to contact the rights holders – obtaining permission can take months if there is a delay in the rights holder responding to you.
  • Permission may not be required to reuse material (eg public domain works, open access content) but in the absence of a clear copyright status or permissions, you should assume copyright applies and permission is required.
  • Keep track of the copyright information and permissions for any third-party materials you identify. Use a tool like our Thesis Copyright Clearance Appendix [insert!]; when it comes time to deposit your thesis with the Library, you’ll easily know what redactions may be necessary in the public version of your thesis.

You can find out more about ‘clearing’ copyright permissions on our page about Publishing: copyright & personal data (forthcoming).

Requesting permission to reuse materials

Rights holders may grant you permission (a licence) to reuse their copyrighted material at no cost or request a fee. Rights holders may waive a fee if they know you are reproducing material for the non-commercial, educational purpose of submitting and publicly sharing your thesis.

In your request for permission, let the copyright holder know your thesis will be shared open access (under a CC BY-NC-ND licence) but that the repository’s terms of use clearly state third-party rights holders retain their copyright. 

  • Ask them how they would like their copyright to be presented in a credit line (e.g. © [Year, Name. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.]
  • Including a credit line for each image or figure communicates that you have permission to include in the public version of your thesis.
  • For more on copyright and more examples of credit lines see Publishing: Personal data & copyright (forthcoming). 

If you do not receive permission to include third-party copyrighted materials in the public version of your thesis, you can still include this in the examination copy (there is an exception under the CDPA to permit this) but you must remove or redact those materials in the version which will be shared publicly. 

As with any other third-party materials, you need to have permission to reproduce an article published elsewhere if you wish to include it in the public version of your thesis. This is because non-open access publishing often involves contractual arrangements around copyright and reproduction rights.

There are three ways to treat your publications in the public version of your thesis. 

  1. If published open access (publisher’s version/Version of Record is OA):
    • This applies where the version published on the journal’s webpage which has been formatted and copy edited in the publisher’s style is published open access, ie under a Creative Commons or equivalent licence, such as a Crown Copyright licence.
    • In this case, you can reproduce the published version in your public thesis. 
  2. If not published open access but a different version is available:
    • This applies where the version published on the journal’s webpage is not open access (normally available only by subscription or for a fee) but the accepted manuscript has been made available in an institutional repository or pre-print server under a Creative Commons licence.
    • In this case, replace the published version with the open access accepted manuscript version in your public thesis. Include the DOI to the published version and a short explanatory note at the top: eg ‘The Version of Record is available at [DOI]; the Accepted Manuscript is reproduced below, available open access at [Link to AM record in a repository]’.
    • To ensure you can use this approach as needed, we recommend always including our Scholarly Works Policy statement in your submitted manuscript and create an output record with the Accepted Manuscript to our institutional repository (Pure).    
  3. If not published open access and no other open version is available:
    • This applies when the version published on the journal’s webpage is not open access and there is no other version (like the accepted manuscript) available open access either.
    • Some accepted manuscripts may be made available after an embargo period in an institutional repository but if they do not include an open licence (eg CC BY), you may not have the right to reproduce that file.
    • In this case, you will need to redact that section of your public thesis in full and include a statement like ‘This article is available at [DOI] but has been redacted in this thesis file due to copyright restrictions.’
    • You can also contact the publisher to request permission to reproduce the article in the public version of your thesis under a separate copyright statement, but they may request a fee for doing so. 

Redactions (removing material which must not be published) do not need to be applied to your examination copy. The best time to apply redactions is after your thesis has been submitted for academic assessment and before you deposit it to Pure. 

You should ensure that whatever you remove does not change the pagination in the redacted version of your thesis. Remember, the unredacted version must still be deposited, but it will not be made publicly available. 

Redacting short sections of text

Remove the specific text and replace it with ‘[Redacted]’ (include the square brackets). You may wish to give further information, such as the reason for the redaction eg ‘[Redacted to anonymise]’.

Redacting longer text, images or figures

Redacting longer sections of text, images, or figures may impact the page numbering of your thesis. We recommend removing the material and replacing it with a text box of the same size. Include [Removed for [‘x’ reason, e.g. copyright]. This is sometimes called ‘tombstoning.’

If the material is available on another website, such as an archive, an alternative way to redact material you cannot reproduce directly is to provide a link to the alternative source. When you remove the text, images, or figures, include, for example, [Removed for copyright reasons; original material available at (link)] in the text box instead. This will help your readers consult the material you referenced, even if you can’t include it in the public version of your thesis.

An example of how to tombstone an image, including text to use and a redirect to publicly available material

If your thesis contains information which must not be published immediately, but could be published in the future, you can request access to that material be deferred so that a redacted version will be available for a period and the full version will be released later). For example, if your thesis contains information which will be included in a patent application, that information should not be made public before the application is filed but it can be made available after a delay. 

A ‘deferral’ is a delay to public access and normally requires University approval through the deferral process.

In exceptional circumstances, it may never be suitable to make parts of your thesis publicly available; for example, where material has national security implications. Requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis through the deferral process.

To request approval for substantial redactions or a longer deferral, review the guidance on Delaying public access to your dissertation (thesis).