RSP - Publishing Support

Details about how to format your thesis, including layout, format, content, length and appearance can be found in the Postgraduate Research Thesis and Submission Guidance. This can be accessed via the Doctoral College's Student Portal Site.

If you have questions about the practicalities of submission, contact the PGR Lifecycle Team (pgrlifecycle@coventry.ac.uk). For discipline specific formatting questions, please contact your Director of Studies.

After your final submission, your thesis is sent through to the Open Research and Scholarly Publications team to process and put on Pure to be shared. Once the thesis is made open on Pure, it will also be harvested and made available on the British Library’s EThOS Repository.

By depositing your work in the Institutional Repository, your thesis has a permanent home, allowing increased access and promotion of your research to others in the field.

Ahead of your thesis being shared, you may need to think about whether you need to embargo your thesis (i.e. restrict the thesis from being shared for a certain length of time), and whether you need to get permission for any third-party material in your thesis.

While all Coventry University theses are added to the Pure Repository, you may wish to delay the full text of your thesis being made openly available; this is known as applying an embargo.

You may wish to embargo your thesis if you intend to publish your thesis/content from your thesis in another form, as some publisher may not be happy with the work being available elsewhere. If this is the case, you can embargo your thesis for up to 2 years. If you need an embargo for longer than 2 years but less than 5 years, you will need permission from the ORSP team by emailing ORSP and explaining the reason for your extension. If you need an embargo longer than 5 years, you will also need permission from the Doctoral College.

If the thesis contains sensitive or confidential information that cannot be redacted, or another organisation(s) has/have an interest in the Intellectual Property Rights to the work in the thesis, and has/have a commercial or legal requirement to not make the thesis public, then you may need to apply an embargo. You can apply for an embargo of up to 5 years, although longer embargos (including indefinite embargos) can be applied with permission from the Doctoral College.

To apply an embargo, simply indicate the length of embargo and the reason for your decision when you fill out the Candidate's Declaration Form at the point of your final submission post-viva. This form is available through the Doctoral College Student Portal Site. If you are granted an embargo but decide while the embargo is in effect that it is no longer necessary you can let us know by e-mailing oa.lib@coventry.ac.uk. We will contact your Director of Studies to establish if it is appropriate to make the thesis available earlier.

When reusing other people's work (or your own work that has been published), you will often need to get permission. You will need permission for third party copyright material like long extracts from publications, or illustrations such as images, maps, photographs, tables etc. Short quotations that have been referenced appropriately would be considered fair use, and you probably won't need permission. If you want your thesis to include this third-party copyright material in the open version available in the institutional repository, then you will need to get permission. Please retain the permission and provide it with your thesis upon final submission post-viva.

Please note that you will not be penalised if you include third-party material in your thesis without acquiring permissions, and the outcome of your examination will not be affected in any way. No student will be required to make any payments to copyright holders for material they wish to include in their thesis. The full thesis, including this material, will be available to your examiners, and after your outcome this material will be redacted when we make your thesis available online.

For more information about third-party copyright, permissions requests and fair use, see our copyright LibGuides page  

All Coventry University thesis from 2008 onwards (and any theses prior to 2008 that have been digitised) can be found in the Pure Repository. You can search through these theses by keywords, or filter the selection based on type, year and department.

We do also have a collection of physical print theses, from 1962 up to 2017. These are held in the Library's closed stacks and can be found using Locate. These theses have to be requested at the Library Reception Desk, as access to the closed stacks is restricted to Library staff.

When searching generally for PhD theses, two useful resources are:

If you find a thesis from another university that is not available through the above resources, it is sometimes possible to gain access to them through the Document Supply Service.

Unfortunately, we only catalogue theses from either PhDs or Masters by Research. If you are searching for your own Undergraduate or Taught Masters dissertation, we would suggest contacting your original department as they may have a copy or be able to direct you to where copies have been stored. Please note that not all departments will be storing dissertations and that they may not be able to assist you.