ACAP Learning Resources Thesis Submission

Once your Honours or Masters thesis has been approved, add a digital copy to the ACAP Library Theses Collection.  Adding your thesis is optional but there are many advantages to adding your thesis to this online collection:

• Exposure for your research
• Helps build your scholarly and research profile
• Clinicians can apply your findings
• Other researchers can access your work.

Theses may be submitted from the following courses:

• Bachelor of Social Work (Honours)
• Master of Social Work (Qualifying)
• Bachelor of Psychological Sciences (Honours)
• Master of Psychology (Clinical)

Please read all the information on this page to ensure you comply with all the requirements. 

1. Do you have a copy of your thesis as a single PDF?
2. Have you received permission to use copyright material?
3. Have you redacted parts of your thesis where you are not able to get copyright permission? See Copyright section below for further details.
4. Have you removed any personal information from the document such as your signature or your residential address? See more on Redacting Thesis Content below.
5. Have you adhered to the copyright guidelines? See Copyright section below for further details.
6. Have you applied to request restriction of access if necessary? See Restriction of Access section below.

If you have any queries in relation to this process, please contact your course coordinator.

Please complete the form from the Submit Thesis tab and save your thesis as a PDF, ready to upload to our system.

All theses are uploaded as open access unless you request restriction of access.   It can be accessed by anyone, worldwide, through ACAP Online Thesis Collection in ACAP MultiSearch.

You may consider restriction of access for any number of reasons including:

• Ethical reasons
• Protection of sources
• Cultural sensitivities
• Intellectual property

If you have a reason for restricting access, your thesis can be made available as a local access thesis. 

A local access thesis is accessible by current staff and students of ACAP, alumni who attend the library premises, or members of the public given access to the thesis under one of the library copying and communication exceptions in the Copyright Act. 

You will be asked if you wish to restrict access when you complete the form.

Your thesis may include copyright materials such as quotes or images from books, journal articles or websites, covered under Fair Dealing for Study or Research provisions.

However, if your thesis is uploaded to the ACAP Library Thesis Collection, you may need to obtain permission from the copyright owners of some of the copyright material you have used.  You may not be able to rely on Fair Dealing exceptions.  This is because Fair Dealing applies to research and study, however, once available online, this status changes.

Here are some examples:

• If you have directly copied or modified another author's image (including graphs, photos, tables, or figures) to use in your thesis.  This applies to any images copied from books, publications or websites.  Each diagram or table constitutes a work in itself.  Therefore, if you reproduce a diagram in its entirety, you need to request permission.  
• Figures or substantial quotes from a journal article.
• Figures or substantial quotes from websites.

You do not need to apply for permission if:

• You are including short quotes from a book or article, if they are an insubstantial portion and are cited correctly.
• You are paraphrasing another author's ideas or main arguments.  You must still always reference the paraphrasing to the original source.
• Copyright for the work has expired.
• You have an express license to use the work, eg. a contract, website conditions, Creative Commons material, the copyright owner has explicitly waived copyright, etc.

If you are using an image (diagram, photo, table, etc.) it is advisable to request permission.

It is important that you start the process of obtaining permission in good time. In some cases, it may not be possible to obtain permission, or you may be asked to pay a licensing fee.

All permission requests must be in writing. You will need to keep copies of all permission documents as records of what permissions have been obtained. These records are considered legal documents and should be retained for as long as your thesis is protected by copyright or it remains on open access. If requested by ACAP, you may be required to provide copies of the permission documents.  

If you are not able to obtain permission for copyright material in your thesis, or you need time to obtain permission, you may redact the third party copyright material.

For more detailed information about copyright, the Copyright Agency is a good starting point.

If permission cannot be obtained, you should remove (redact) the material from the public version of the thesis.

• Delete the restricted text or image and replace it with the phrase [REDACTED].  You may need to add padding to keep your page numbering the same.
• Don't conceal text using black text highlighting:.  In the future there may be technologies that could reveal the hidden text.
• Don't delete the reference to the content you have removed.

If you have completed the checklist above, and have your PDF ready, click the button to submit.

There will be a form to complete and then you can upload your PDF.