At the end of the process, the university requires your thesis to be added to its institutional repository SURE.

You will send the final version of your thesis to the Graduate School. This is the version approved by your examiners after any recommended corrections. The Graduate School will forward the thesis to the Research and Scholarly Communications Team based in University of Sunderland Library alongside the declaration form. 

Please ensure that your thesis is saved as a PDF and that you have followed guidance in the section Tips on writing your thesis to make your document accessible.

Your thesis will be available worldwide via SURE. You can share this link with future employers, collaborators or simply your friends and family.

This version will be Open Access in line with the University's Research Publications, Open Access and Copyright policy

It is important to be aware of this from the start of the project as this can have an impact on the way you handle the ethics approval process if it is necessary for your work. For instance, participants should be aware that the work you will write will be available on a public, open access repository. This should also make you think about the way in which you handle your data and write it up. See the section on Data Management. 

You can see examples of theses written by previous University of Sunderland students in the SURErepository: theses collection of our repository. 

PhDs by existing work or creative practice will also be added to SURE. 

For these types of PhDs, we will often require two versions of the thesis to be added to SURE. 

Version one - the version for examination purposes:

One version will be the full version, with the creative or published work included in the full text. This is the version your examiners will have approved after corrections (if you had any). This version might have to be hidden if it contains extensive third-party material that you do not have the permission to reproduce for use in the public version of your PhD.

Version two - redaction of third-party copyrighted material for public access:

The other version will be redacted - this means that third-party material for which you did not obtain or cannot obtain permission will be removed so we can make your commentary available to the public.

PhD by existing work:

For PhDs by existing work, in most cases the published work cannot be distributed openly on our repository. This is the case for publications where copyright was transferred or where you gave an exclusive license for distribution to the publisher. If that is the case, you should replace the reproduction of the published work with full bibliographic details and a DOI or URL when available. The exception would be if your work was published open access with and open license. 

See for example this thesis by published work: Campbell, Gordon (2024) The missionary Zeal of Scottish Congregationalism. Doctoral Thesis. The University of Sunderland. The version available to the public lists in chapter 8 the publications of the author with URLs when available. 

PhD by creative practice:

For PhD by creative practice, it will be important to think about what material you are using to represent your creative practice and whether any images are under third-party copyright. For instance, you did not take the picture yourself, the work has been commissioned, it is part of an exhibition, etc. As you work through your PhD you should, where relevant, obtain permissions from copyright holders. If you have not, you will need to redact any material where you do not have permission for re-use. You should add a placeholder instead of the redacted material describing as best you can the redacted material and provide any relevant bibliographic details or other ways to identify the material.