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.

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. If you intend to publish elements of your thesis, it is recommended that you check how potential publishers will view its public availability. In a few cases, they may view it as prior publication and reject submissions on that basis. This is rarely the case for journal publishers, so there is rarely a need to restrict access to your thesis because you intend to publish articles from it.

On the other hand, some monograph publishers, particularly in Humanities and Social Sciences may view public availability of your thesis online as prior publication. For this reason, where you are planning on publishing a monograph from your thesis, you are permitted to request an embargo for up to 12 months, with the option to extend once you have secured a publishing contract and can demonstrate that the publisher in question requires a further restriction. We would always recommend you discuss availability of your thesis with your publisher and try to minimise any embargo as your thesis is a key way that other researchers will engage with your work, leading to it being recognised, cited and improving your own reputation in your field.

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. 

There are several legitimate reasons why it may be inappropriate to share a thesis publicly for a period of time. If you believe access to your thesis will need to be restricted, you should allow time before depositing your thesis to complete a restricted access application. The form will need to be approved and signed off by your supervisor and potentially the PGR lead in your area. It should then be uploaded when you make your deposit to eTheses.

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.