The Library is here to help the whole way through the process of producing a thesis, all the way up to sharing the finished thesis. We house thousands of theses both in print and electronically through the WRAP repository. The information below should help with both accessing these theses, as well as how you can prepare your thesis to be deposited.
Support Available
Enquiries - If you have any queries relating to theses, please email the Metadata and Discovery Team at ethos.library@warwick.ac.uk.
Email library@warwick.ac.uk for thesis cataloguing timelines, cataloguing/metadata and digitisation requests.
Book a WRAP 1-2-1 session or email publications@warwick.ac.uk for managing and planning ahead for copyright and potential prior publication issues.
Accessing Theses
Doctoral theses
The Library stores a print copy of every doctoral thesis (PhD, EdD, DClin, DBA, etc.) completed at the University of Warwick, up to 2024. Print theses can be searched via Library Search and can be requested via the Library’s ‘Click and Collect’ service. The thesis will be retrieved from the external store and made available to view at the Modern Records Centre. Please note, print theses are REFERENCE only and cannot be checked out of the Library or MRC. From July 2024, Doctoral theses awarded after this date will be stored in electronic format only. Digital copies are uploaded, stored, and made available on WRAP, and are discoverable through Library Search.
If an electronic thesis on WRAP has been redacted due to the inclusion of copyrighted materials, where possible, the original unredacted copy can be made available to view in electronic or (when available) print copy in the MRC reading rooms. Please send a request to view unredacted theses to ethos.library@warwick.ac.uk.
Masters by Research theses
Theses submitted for a Masters by Research degree (MA, MSc, M Phil, LLM, MS or MMedSci) are not available on WRAP and can be viewed by request only. All print and electronic Masters by Research theses that have been submitted to the Library are discoverable on Library Search. Print holdings held pre-2024 can be requested via Library Search using the ‘Click and Collect’ service.
From July 2024, new Masters by Research theses will be held in electronic format only and will only be available to view by sending an email request to ethos.library@warwick.ac.uk. Please state the author name, thesis title, and department of the MRes thesis you would like to view. The thesis will be made available to view in the MRC reading rooms.
Depositing a Thesis
Disclaimer: This page is intended as guidance only and is not intended to constitute legal advice.
Making Your Thesis Available Electronically
Electronic submission of theses in the Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) is required of all PhD students, from the academic year 2008/09 onwards. This can have great benefits for students, departments and the University, including:
Wider visibility for your research through high search engine ranking and harvest by external services
Extends the global reach of your research and encourages better use of your thesis by others and helps to get your work noticed, used and cited
Easy worldwide access for colleagues, collaborators, job applications and grant proposals
As of July 2024, theses are required to be submitted in electronic format only. Pre-2024 print theses will still be held and made available to students and researchers.
Process for submitting your thesis
When preparing and submitting your thesis you should refer to the Doctoral College for further guidance for students who are approaching the point of submission.
If you wish to embargo your thesis or submit a copy with any problematic third-party copyright material redacted please indicate this on the Library Declaration and Deposit Agreement which should be bound into the front of the hard bound copy you submit to the Doctoral College.
University rules permit you to request an embargo on access to your thesis for a specific period. You should discuss this with your supervisor and follow the standard procedure for arranging an embargo, informing us that your thesis should not be made publicly available online when you submit. More information at the Doctoral College.
Sensitive material which would mean embargoing access to your thesis includes:
Patient or pupil details in clinic-based or education topics
Confidential data revealed by sponsors or through interviews/questionnaires
Real names or personal addresses in case studies or questionnaires
Evidence that animal testing was done
Partnerships with commercial companies who may have a stake in your results
An idea which you wish to patent.
If you are considering patenting the idea(s) described in your thesis then you might find the Warwick Ventures on Intellectual Property useful. In order to obtain a patent, you must not have already published about the idea, and WRAP deposit would constitute publication.
Third party copyright material
It is illegal to make an electronic version of your thesis available if it contains third party copyright material, which you do not have permission from the copyright holders to include.
Material that might be in your thesis and which could be considered third party content includes:
Photographs you did not take
Sections that you subsequently published without significant alteration in a journal or book
Long quotations from other works, even if properly attributed
Material for which a patent was granted
Models/diagrams sourced from books
Maps, such as Ordinance Survey photocopies, or sourced from books
Photocopies or scans of paintings (including portraits) and other artworks, or manuscripts/old accounts/other historical documents
You can include any of this material in your thesis, as it is submitted for the purposes of examination, without needing to seek permission from copyright holders. But we cannot put an electronic version of your thesis online if it contains any material that is not covered by another exception to copyright law, or permission granted by the copyright holder.
Print copies of theses submitted pre-July 2024 are made available for consultation. However, access to the print copies are restricted to those able to access a physical copy of the thesis, and rights holders have been comfortable with that. Allowing online access to theses requires more sensitivity to copyright law. Post-July 2024, theses are submitted in electronic format only.
Copyright law allows referenced quotation of others' work, so you don't need to worry about all content that you include from others' work. If you are including a substantial proportion of another's work, then you may still be able to use it, if you do so in order to criticise or review the content that you have included. Such exceptions require you to make a judgement for yourselves, so you might want to consider whether you would be happy, as an author, with others copying a similar quantity of your own work. When in doubt, it is always better to ask for permission.
Incidental inclusion of a trademark is not an infringement, e.g. if a photo or video clip happens to show a person wearing branded shoes, or drinking a Coca-Cola.
Your options
Obtain permission from copyright holders and include evidence of this permission with the full thesis
Submit an additional abridged version of your thesis without the copyright material but referring to it so that others can find it when reading your work. (You must still submit a whole copy, which will only be accessible to authorised members of University staff.) Please be clear to label the copies/files appropriately, upon submission
Submit the full electronic version of your thesis to WRAP but stipulate that it must not be made openly accessible on the form submitted with your thesis
Not every quote or extract has to be covered by rights owners' permissions. Fair dealing allows for criticism and review, and for small extracts of others' work to be included with your own. How you interpret fair dealing under copyright law is up to you. (Note: this is not the same thing as "Fair Use" which applies only in the USA.) If you are making a serious critical point and your argument cannot be justified without reproducing the content to which you refer then it may be covered by fair dealing and it's up to you to make a judgement call on the matter.
The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers have provided guidance on quotations and excerpts. You might find this helpful, particularly if you wish to include content from one of the 12 key publishers who signed up to this guidance. It makes clear statements about the inclusion of diagrams and illustrations, which are more tricky to know how to handle than text.
This depends on what material you wish to include and who the rights owners are. It will take time and you should ideally seek permission from the earliest stage at which you think you wish to include the content in your thesis.
Rights owners might be the publisher, author or illustrator. It is a good idea to start by contacting the publisher. Publishers of your own work are generally inclined to let authors include their publication material in their online theses, but you will need to ask.
Publisher web sites are a good place to look for who to send your request to: look for information on copyright, permissions or clearance for example and you can use the template text provided below to help request permissions as well.
It may take a long time (weeks) for a rights holder to get back in touch with you, but a lack of response does not indicate permission to go ahead. Sometimes obtaining permission to use third party copyright content can be a tricky and lengthy process.
I am contacting you to seek permission to include the following material within the electronic version of my PhD thesis:
[Provide full details of the material you intend to include]
If you are not the rights holder for this material I would be grateful if you would advise me who to contact.
The thesis will be made available within the University of Warwick's online research repository (https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk). The repository is non-commercial and openly available to all.
If a copyright holder indicates that permission has been granted you should indicate this at the appropriate point in your thesis, e.g. 'Permission to reproduce this ... has been granted by...'. You should keep a copy of any letters or e-mails you received from rights holders, and include electronic copies of them with your submission.
A publisher may wish to charge you a fee before they will allow you to use their content in your online thesis, but you do not have to pay unless you wish to. You do not have to make your thesis (or that content) available online.
If you get no response, or if the response is a negative or too expensive for you, then you can use the option to embargo access to your thesis online, or submit a version of your thesis with un-permitted content removed.
Prior publication issues
If you are looking to publish material from your thesis once your PhD has been awarded you should be aware that some publishers have concerns about this. For some publishers WRAP deposit can constitute prior publication.
Does WRAP deposit affect publisher interest in my thesis? - this depends on the publisher and what they plan on publishing from your thesis.
Some publishers ask authors to sign agreements stating that they have not previously published their work elsewhere, and some publishers do consider availability in a repository like WRAP, or any availability online, to be a form of publication. A publisher can't claim ownership of the copyright in your thesis, but they could consider that, since the work is already available, there would be little demand for their version. To this end, you should also consider embargoing access to the print version of your thesis and discuss this with your supervisor.
Some publishers are not concerned about theses in repositories: your work would be formatted differently and marketed if published by them. You could put your thesis in the repository and then demonstrate that people are looking at it already (contact us publications@warwick.ac.uk for stats), and use that as evidence of interest. We have had more than one case where a student was approached by a publisher because they had seen their thesis in WRAP.
The WRAP team conducted a survey of publishers on this issue and the results of this survey provide more advice on this topic:
The WRAP team initiated a small scale survey of 33 publishers. They were given a number of options to assess their attitude to thesis publication. We received 15 responses. Below are the results of the survey as well as the names of the publishers if they gave us permission to make their responses public.
Option
No. of Publishers
Including:
a. Thesis must not have been deposited. We require authors to state that their work has not been previously published in any way, and this means that they must not have deposited their work online in any publicly accessible way. Any author who has put their thesis online could not get a book based on their PhD research published through us.
3
Equinox Publishing Ltd.
b. Thesis can have been deposited but must not remain on public access. We require authors to state that their work has not been previously published in any way, but if it has been previously deposited online and made publicly accessible this would not jeopardise chances of publication. We would be likely to request a permanent take-down at the time that we accept the title for publication as one of our books.
3
MIT Press
c. Thesis can have been deposited but must temporarily be removed from public access. We require authors to state that their work has not been previously published in any way, but if it has been previously deposited online and made publicly accessible this would not jeopardise chances of publication. We would be likely to request a time-limited take-down at the time that we accept the title for publication as one of our books.
0
d. Thesis can be deposited and remain publicly available. We require authors to state that their work has not been previously published in any way, but we are not concerned about the deposit or otherwise of the original PhD thesis as we require the work to be substantially worked in order to be publishable as one of our books and do not consider online availability of a thesis in an institutional repository to be an equivalent publication.
e. Thesis can be deposited and remain publicly available. Online publications of all kinds are positively encouraged in our authors as marketing activity for the books that we publish. It would not jeopardise any author’s chances of publication with us if their PhD thesis was publicly available online.
0
f. Other
4
Elsevier Science & Technology Books
In most cases the publishers who chose the final option (other) were not willing to state a single response but rather wanted to consider theses on a case by case basis, however they did give the impression they would prefer that the thesis had not been made available.
As you can see there is little consensus in approach between the publishers.
If you would like more information or to discuss your options please contact us publications@warwick.ac.uk.
What to do next
You could phone round the publishers you are considering approaching, to ask for their policy on this matter and should consult with your supervisor. It would be best to consider the policies of specific publishers you are approaching because as we have seen there is no consistency of approach, and there isn't a tool collating publisher policies all in one place.
If you are looking to publish your thesis, we would advise you to select the option that asks for an embargo period of at least two years to find a publisher. It is worth discussing the most appropriate period with your supervisor as they may be aware of the attitudes of the specific publishers most important to your discipline.
If it comes to the end of the embargo period and you are still in discussions with publishers, you can use this form to apply to extend your embargo period.
