GENERAL InformaTIONS

DEADLINES Calendar IN PROGRESS

In this section you will find information on the requirements you will need to fulfill in order to move on to subsequent years.

DEADLINES

I (XL Cycle) - II YEAR (XXXIX Cycle)

BY LATE SEPTEMBER (date to be determined)

Upload the annual report in English of the research and teaching activities carried out during the year.

The procedure for accessing and depositing the Google Drive folder will be communicated via e-mail.

OCTOBER 2025 (date to be determined)
I year (XL cycle)
(10 min + 3 min for discussion time)

SEPTEMBER 2025 (date to be determined)
II year (XXXIX cycle)
(15 min + 3 min for discussion time)

Presentation of its results by oral communication in English to the Teaching Staff and fellow PhD students.

PARAMETERS TO COUNT HOURS OF EDUCATIONAL AND SIMILAR ACTIVITIES

Training courses for students in the Doctoral School

Doctoral students must reach at least 12 ECTS over the three years considering that each ECTS is equal to 8 hours of frontal teaching.
Of the above 12 ECTS min 8 INTERNAL ECTS are obtainable by choosing:
- courses scheduled by the Doctoral School (ECTS on the Teaching page)
- 0.1 credit/hour per department seminar
- max 2 credits for internal master's degree study courses
- max 2 credits for Third Mission activities
and min 4 EXTERNAL ECTS that can be acquired with the following plan:
- 0.5 ECTS/day for conferences
- 1.0 ECTS/day for schools

Integrated teaching

Max 40 hours/year.

Tutoring

Max 180 hours in the three years.

DEADLINES

III YEAR (XXXVIII cycle)

BY DECEMBER 2025 (date to be determined)

Upload the annual report in English of the research and teaching activities carried out during the year.

The procedure for accessing and depositing the Google Drive folder will be communicated via e-mail.

BY DECEMBER 2025 (date to be determined)

Upload the thesis (included a brief summary of it) in standard PDF/A-1B format (ISO standards: ISO 19005-1), prepared in English and countersigned by the tutor.
The procedure for accessing and depositing the Google Drive folder will be communicated by e-mail.
Please note that theses will be checked with Turnitin anti-plagiarism software (declaration and authorisation to antiplagiarism detection). The procedure and the form to be completed will be communicated via e-mail.

BY THE END OF DECEMBER

The Teaching Staff will evaluate and can approve the thesis: after the approval, the Coordinator will send the thesis and the report to the two reviewers.

The tutor of each PhD student should propose to the Coordinator the names of two external evaluators (external teachers of high qualification, including foreign ones) who are experts on the topic of their doctoral candidate's thesis and whose availability to review the thesis has already been verified.

Once the choice of evaluators is approved by the Coordinator, the tutors send them the evaluation form while the candidates send them the thesis.

WITHIN 30 DAYS FROM THE RECEPTION OF THE THESIS

The two reviewers will express an analytical judge on the thesis and propose admission to the final discussion or a postponement of up to 6 months for any corrections (with new opinion) - the PhD students will be able to correct the theses on the basis of the observations of the reviewers before transmission of the thesis to the competent offices.

The Coordinator will communicate to the offices the analytical judge of the reviewers, admitted to the exam, the date, time and place of the discussion (which will be indicatively towards the end of January) and the names of the three members of the Exam Commission.

The Coordinator will transmit the opinion of the external reviewers to the three members of the Exam Commission.

The Research Doctorates office will proceed to invite the PhD students admitted to the exam on the date indicated by the Coordinator.

Before the discussion, the invited PhD student must send a copy of the final thesis to the Research/Doctorates - Research Fellows area by e-mail in PDF/A format (if there are attachments to the thesis, must prepare individual PDF/A, one for each individual attachment) and to each of the three members of the Exam Commission if he has not done so before (in the mode that the commissioners prefer).

BY THE END OF FEBRUARY
(DATE TO BE DEFINED EVERY YEAR)

The PhD student will take the final exam in front of the Selection Staff made up of three commissioners (of which at least two are external).

FINAL ELABORATE PREPARATION

As soon as the call for the final exam is received (which takes place via e-mail), the candidate must reply to the Research/Doctorate-Research Grants Sector and simultaneously to the groupOA@uniupo.it address or commissioneoa@uniupo.it, sending the final thesis in PDF/A format and, in attach, the release form for the filing of the PhD thesis in the IRIS Research Product Catalog (art. 8, comma 17 “Regolamento di Ateneo in materia di dottorato di ricerca”).

Please note that uploading is done by the librarians of the working group on open access; the bibliographic data of the thesis and the file in .PDF/A format of the elaborate are inserted in the database. It is their responsibility to further verify that there are no copyrighted materials in the thesis. In this case the thesis is made available with open access in the IRIS portal. If not, however, the candidates concerned are contacted to define how the documents can be made accessible and examinable.

The candidate may also request that their doctoral thesis be subject to an blockade period of no more than 12 months, starting from the date of discussion. During this period the theses will not be open access, but the related bibliographic data and the abstract will still be available.

The blockade can be requested for specific reasons: reasons of secrecy and/or ownership of the results and/or sensitive information or for reasons of secrecy and/or ownership of the results and information of external institutions or private companies that participated in the realization of research.

For any explanation, you can contact the librarians of the working group directly at:
gruppoOA@uniupo.it