Post-Defence Submission

Ensure all required forms are submitted electronically to the College of Graduate Studies (gradtheses.ok@ubc.ca).

• Master’s Thesis Approval and Program Completion Form OR Doctoral Dissertation Approval and Program Completion Form
• Thesis Dissertation Submission Cover Sheet

Once The College of Graduate Studies receives the mandatory forms, students will be allowed to register and upload the thesis to cIRcle for the final formatting review.The student should activate their cIRcle account by going to the UBC Library cIRcle User Registration page:

1. On the registration page, enter your email address to register.
2. Once a cIRcle account has been created, you will be sent an email prompting you to set a password.
3. After setting a password, you must send an email to the College of Graduate Studies (gradtheses.ok@ubc.ca) to request the account be activated. You must include your name and email address in the body of the email.
4. You will be notified to submit the thesis once the cIRcle account has been activated.

You can now submit the thesis:

1. Convert your thesis to a single non-secured PDF file. The PDF file must be compatible with Adobe Acrobat version 5, and must not be in “secured” format or password-protected.
2. Access the cIRcle Login page and use your email address and password to sign in to cIRcle.
3. Under “My Account” in the left sidebar, click on “Submissions”.
4. Click on “Start a New Submission”.
5. Submit to the collection “Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) 2008+”.
6. Add your thesis information in the appropriate boxes and menus. When typing your thesis name into the cIRcle Thesis Title field, type ‘Okanagan’ in front of the actual thesis name. Click the “Next” button when finished with each step. You can cancel or save your submission at any time. If you save an incomplete submission, you can login to continue it at any time.
7. You can now upload your thesis. Name the file using the following format, all lower case: ubc_gradyear_gradmonth_lastname_firstname.pdf. A student’s grad month is the month in which their degree will be conferred by Senate.The College of Graduate Studies will notify you of your anticipated grad month via email once you have registered for your cIRcle account. Ensure characters are limited to Roman letters (a-z), numbers (0-9), and underscores (_).
   Please click on the “Browse” button and locate the file before clicking “Upload”.
8. Additional Materials
   For subsequent files, you will number them according to the order in which you plan to upload them to cIRcle:
   ubc_gradyear_gradmonth_lastname_firstname_file[#]_filetype.xyz
   Ensure characters are limited to Roman letters (a-z), numbers (0-9), and underscores (_).
   Select the “Browse” button and locate the file(s) on your computer. Then, select “Upload file & add another”. You should upload all thesis files approved by your committee during this step.When uploading multi-file theses, the PDF file containing your title page and preliminary pages must be the first-listed file in your submission. Subsequent files should then be submitted in order of importance as determined by your Committee.
9. Confirm that you have uploaded the correct file(s) and review your submission.
10. The next page is a check for duplicate files. Click “Next”.
11. Complete the Creative Commons License questions. Students are encouraged to review the options on the Creative Commons website before starting their final submission.
12. Read and approve the UBC cIRcle License. Please read the license carefully.
13. Once you have made the submission, the final screen will indicate that the submission was successful.
14. The thesis will be reviewed within two to five business days and the student will be notified by email if any changes are required.
15. After the student has made any required changes, the student should log back in to cIRcle and re-submit the corrected thesis. The student must be sure to remove the original file before uploading the corrected file. It may take up to two to five business days for the thesis to be reviewed again.
16. When the College of Graduate Studies has reviewed and approved the thesis, the student will receive email notification.

Note: Students are encouraged to check their email after submission to ensure any required corrections are made. A submission is not complete and does not meet deadlines until the thesis has been approved, and the student has received an official email receipt. If the thesis does not meet the UBC required standards upon a student’s first submission, it will be sent back to the student, requesting the student to resubmit. If the thesis continues to fail to meet UBC standards, the thesis will be returned to the student upon each subsequent submission and placed in the queue in the order of date received. When the thesis meets the College of Graduate Studies’ requirements, the student will receive email notification that it has been added to the UBC Library’s cIRcle Institutional Repository.

Visit the Library’s wiki page for a detailed walkthrough of the registration and upload processes.

LEARN MORE

Scholarly research and communication is enhanced when research inputs in addition to the final polished culmination (thesis, dissertation, or other manuscript or scholarly product) are made available and connected to the final scholarly product. 

LEARN MORE

MFA students may choose to submit to the “Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Creative Arts, 2017+ (CWL ACCESS)” collection in cIRcle. Access to this collection is permanently restricted to individuals who have a Campus-Wide Login (CWL). The collection is not available to the public.

To submit to this collection, follow the above “Register in cIRcle” and “Submit your thesis” instructions with the following exceptions:

• In step 3 (under Register in cIRcle), in your email to the College of Graduate Studies, state that you will be submitting to the “Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Creative Arts, 2017+ (CWL ACCESS)” collection.If you do not notify the College of Graduate Studies, you will not have access to this collection.
• In step 1 (under Submit your thesis), convert the text portion of your thesis to a single non-secured PDF. Ensure that multimedia files are in formats that are accepted by the UBC Library.
• In step 5 (under Submit your thesis), Submit to the collection “Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Creative Arts, 2017+ (CWL ACCESS)”.
• Before step 10 (under Submit your thesis), you will be required to review the terms of access for your thesis submission.

Note: MFA students can choose to upload to either the “Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) 2008+” collection or the “Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Creative Arts, 2017+ (CWL ACCESS)” collection, but once the thesis has been approved, the thesis cannot be switched to the other collection.

The College of Graduate Studies must be informed about reasons for delays in publication of theses and dissertations. If there is strong justification, the College of Graduate Studies may agree to delay publication of a thesis/dissertation for 12 months. Under special circumstances, and with substantive rationale, this delay in publication may be extended in 12-month increments. Students wanting to request a delay in publication of their thesis must do so before the thesis is submitted electronically.

A student might wish to request that publication be delayed if any of the following circumstances applies:

• Time is required for completion and submission of a significant manuscript or patent application for a device or idea that might emerge from the thesis research.
• The thesis describes something of considerable monetary potential which could, if the student were given an opportunity to develop it, benefit the student or the University.
• Funding for the research was provided by a commercial company which has requested a delay in publication.
• The thesis deals with a potentially dangerous product or process, or potential cure for a disease, for which more testing time is needed before public release of the information.

The Dean of College of Graduate Studies will approve the request only when there is a full and convincing justification for delaying publication of the thesis in the Library’s online repository.  If an embargo is requested and approved, all files are embargoed.  Students cannot embargo some files but not others.

To request a delay, please use the Request for Approval to Withhold a Dissertation/Thesis from the Public Domain and submit the fully-signed form to the College of Graduate Studies along with your other final submission forms.

When submitting the thesis to cIRcle, students should:

1. Type “EMBARGO” in front of the thesis title when entering the title into cIRcle. This alerts reviewers to the request for publication delay. Do not put “EMBARGO” on the title page of the thesis.
2. Enter the full abstract in the “Abstract” field in cIRcle. Abstracts for embargoed theses are automatically hidden from public view. Instead, the following boilerplate abstract text appears in the abstract record: “The full abstract for this thesis is available in the body of the thesis, and will be available when the embargo expires.”
3. On the page where the thesis file can be uploaded, go to “File Availability”, select “Embargo” and enter the date when the thesis will become publicly available.

Note: Unless you have submitted the Withhold Thesis from the Public Domain form and your request has been approved, your embargo date will be removed.

When the thesis is accepted, the title and boilerplate abstract text will appear in cIRcle, but the thesis itself and the actual abstract will not be available. During the embargo period, a request for access to view the thesis can be made through cIRcle. The request will go to the College of Graduate Studies and will be relayed to the student by email. The student can then grant or deny temporary access to the thesis.

When the embargo period ends, the thesis will be automatically released and will be available online. If an additional extension to the embargo period is required, it is the responsibility of the student to contact the College of Graduate Studies no less than one month before the release date.

Students are encouraged to proofread their thesis carefully before submitting the final version. Changes cannot be made to the thesis after it has been approved. Check for:

• consistent capitalization
• consistent, sequential section numbering
• consistent abbreviations and units of measure
• consistent line spacing and table formatting
• typographical errors
• grammatical errors

Proofreading is primarily the responsibility of the student, but supervisors and examiners should not sign off on theses until they are free of errors.