After approval and consent from the supervisors, the student submits the thesis to the Student Repository. The educational programme does a final review before the submission is visible to the public, see the manual Registering your student thesis.

The thesis itself can only be made publicly available if the student, supervisor and the external client (if applicable) have given their consent to do so. Download the Thesis Publication Consent Form or ask your programme secretary. 

Before adding an academic publication to the Repository, every submitter is asked to accept the License to inclusion and publication of a Bachelor or a Master thesis in the Leiden University Student Repository. This states all regulations pertaining to the ways in which a publication may be used by the library. Among other things, it says the author keeps the copyright of his/her thesis. As the author, you state you don’t violate any rights of others (copyright, image right). The University is indemnified against any claims in this concern. The University is allowed to store the thesis, and – provided consent – make it publicly available. The University obliges itself to maintain the file as readable in the future, and warrant an embargo if applicable. 

Before a thesis can be uploaded to the Student Repository, the student, supervisor(s) and third parties (internship) have to fill out the Thesis Publication Consent Form (see above). The thesis will remain under embargo (permanent or temporary) if any of the aforementioned stakeholders does not agree with providing Open Access to the theses PDF. The embargo can be set during upload.

A thesis can only be uploaded in one file. If part of the thesis is to remain under embargo , use the longest embargo period while uploading and contact your Program Secretary. The University Libraries will then split the pdf file and apply the necessary embargoes.

Putting an embargo on a thesis is always a conscious decision from the student and/or supervisor and/or third parties involved. This means the University Libraries will not provide access to the files of embargoed theses to third parties.

• Only PDF-files are accepted. In Microsoft Office, documents can be saved as a PDF directly via the Save menu. In OpenOffice, use File – Export as PDF. Otherwise, pdf conversion software is available on university computers, or use online software.

• Please upload the final and approved version of your thesis.

• Please do not put any privacy-sensitive information, such as your address, phone number or student number, in the thesis file if your thesis is publicly available!

• Theses in the Repository are indexed by Google and can be found easily using the author’s name, title or words from the contents of the pdf (if publicly available).