Redacting material from your eThesis

It may be necessary to redact some of the material from your eThesis in order to share it on ORO. Reasons for redaction of material include:

• Your eThesis contains sensitive or confidential information. This could be names, addresses, phone numbers, signatures, or other identifiable details.
• Your eThesis contains third-party copyright material you do not have permission to use, for example images, illustrations, graphs, maps, diagrams, or extracts of text from books, journals, or other publications that would not be considered fair dealing for criticism, review, or quotation.
• Your eThesis contains photographs of people who have not granted you permission to use their image online. More information on third-party copyrighted is provided on the page 'Copyright and your thesis'.
• Parts of your thesis have already been published (i.e. PhD by published work) and you have been unable to gain permission from the publisher to include the content. In this instance you should add the DOI for the published content. 

There may be other reasons why you should consider redacting material from your thesis, but you should not redact material unnecessarily. As a general rule your thesis should be as complete as possible, but suppressing contentious material could allow you to make a redacted version of your thesis open access, while the full version of your thesis remains unpublished.

How to redact:

1. Start with your original document rather than the PDF version.
2. Where possible delete all he restricted content and replace with a text box of the same size. Using a text box to replace images will allow you to retain the same layout as your original thesis and will not alter the page numbers and other formatting. (Example of a redacted thesis).
3. In the textbox explain what type of material has been redacted using the word ‘redacted’.
4. DO NOT leave the original text behind black highlighting as it may still be possible for readers to uncover the text.

You will need to submit both the original and the redacted versions of your eThesis. Please ensure the two file names are clearly distinguishable by adding ‘Redacted’ to the title of the redacted file.