FAQs eTheses repository

Students completing Postgraduate Research programmes at the University of Birmingham are required to submit an electronic copy of their final thesis to the University. The award letter sent by the Research Student Administration will confirm whether a PGR student is subject to the thesis submission requirement.

Please note that the hardbound thesis submission is carried out via a separate submission method; please refer to the Research Student Administration team award letter for information on this.

If your thesis is accompanied by datasets, software or code, we advise you to upload them to the UBIRA eData repository or any other suitable repository. Exceptions are compositions that are a central part of the thesis.

If you are no longer able to use your university login, you can deposit your thesis via Formstack.

If you are an alumnus or alumna who gained a research degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil by research) from the University in the past, you will not be able to self-deposit without a current University of Birmingham login, however you are welcome to contact the Scholarly Communications Services team at ubira@lists.bham.ac.uk where we will be happy to discuss options for digitising your thesis and making it available electronically. Please note we are only able to digitise and disseminate theses held in hardcopy by the library, please check FindIt@Bham to see if a thesis is held in our collection.

A thesis is an examination document and a unit of work which must be produced in order to be awarded a degree. There is some evidence that this does not affect publication in the Sciences where the unit of publication is much shorter (focused journal articles, for example). For book publication, particularly in the Social Sciences and Humanities there is more concern.

A published version of a thesis is usually aimed at a different audience, peer reviewed, re-written, significantly edited and presented more attractively. Some publishers raise concerns about prior disclosure of research findings and it may be necessary to embargo access to a specific thesis, which is catered for in the depositing of theses with the University. It is something you need to take into account if you are intending to rewrite your thesis as a book or you may wish to obtain agreement with a Publisher earlier on in the process about releasing the original thesis giving some thought to the Copyright issues.

The digitisation of older theses is based upon demand via the EThOS service.

Library Services will contact authors of specific theses and ask for permission for an electronic copy if possible or permission to scan the paper copy. The thesis will be sent to EThOS for digitisation and will appear on EThOS. Users need to register and accept the terms and conditions before being able to download the full text. Copies will also be stored in the UBIRA eTheses repository.

All doctoral theses will be indexed by EThOS, the British Library-run national thesis service, and theses which are open access will also be made available to download from the EThOS system. The thesis can also be found via major search engines such as Google or Open Access services such as CORE. 

When you submit a thesis to the research archive the metadata (author, title, keywords, etc) will be displayed. The full text link will not be displayed if you place an embargo at the deposit stage.

You will need to obtain permission of the Copyright Holder if you wish to reproduce an article in your thesis. If you wish to upload your thesis into UBIRA you will need to ensure that the copyright permissions allow such treatment.

You can ask the Scholarly Communications Services team for help at ubira@lists.bham.ac.uk.