Submission Guidelines for Dissertations and Theses

Benefits to UMass Chan students of archiving your thesis/dissertation in the eScholarship@UMassChan repository

  • Immediate exposure through Google and other search engines to maximize readership and impact (citations) of your scholarship
  • Download statistics are available
  • Permanent link, DOI and citation for inclusion on your CV

Requirements prior to submission

  1. Students must follow the graduate school's preparation guidelines for doctoral dissertations and master's theses to ensure that formatting is correct, no required pages are missing, and their document is properly converted to PDF format. Please make sure your document is as accessible to users with disabilities as possible. This ensures ease of use and the broadest possible readership for your work. See our accessibility guidelines for authors.
  2. Students should ensure that their thesis/dissertation is free of errors. Once the graduate school has posted the document on eScholarship@UMassChan, corrections cannot be made unless the student submits an official request to the Dean of the graduate school.
  3. Students and their thesis advisor should discuss and reach a mutual agreement regarding which embargo option and which license are appropriate. See section below on "Public access, embargoes, licenses, and subsequent publishing" for guidelines and a full explanation of options.
  4. The eScholarship Permission Form must be filled out and signed electronically by the student and the student’s advisor(s). This form certifies that the manuscript is complete and has been approved by the student’s advisory committee, and designates the student’s selections for embargo and re-use rights. Links to the permission forms are available from the Morningside GSBS and Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing dissertation collection home pages.
  5. Students are required to register for an ORCID and enter their ORCID ID on the eScholarship Permission Form. ORCIDs are unique author identifiers for researchers that are becoming integrated into research workflows. Your ORCID iD ensures you get credit for your work throughout your career and is increasingly a requirement for publication and funding. Registration is free and takes 30 seconds.

Before you begin the online submission process

Before you begin the online submission process, please be sure you have the following items ready:

  • Full text of your final, approved thesis/dissertation in PDF format
  • Abstract
  • Keywords
  • Name of Thesis Advisor(s)
  • Your eScholarship Permission Form must first be completed and electronically signed by you and your thesis advisor(s)
  • Supplemental files to be displayed on the web page with your thesis/dissertation (e.g. data sets, video clips, sound files), if applicable

How to submit

  • Navigate to eScholarship@MassChan and select the Log In link in the upper right. Choose "UMass Chan Login".
  • Select the + (plus sign) on the left to open up the New menu and select Item. 
  • Choose the appropriate collection:
    • For Morningside GSBS students: Select "Morningside GSBS Dissertations and Theses"
    • For Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing students: Select "Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing Dissertations"
  • Fill in submission form, following the instructions under each field
  • Upload your file(s)
  • Review your submission
  • Read and agree to the eScholarship@UMassChan Non-Exclusive Deposit License
  • Select the Deposit button to complete the submission

What happens next

  • After reviewing the submission, the graduate school or the library will contact the student for any revisions necessary.
  • The library will post the thesis/dissertation in eScholarship@UMassChan within 1-2 weeks of acceptance, with or without an embargo and Creative Commons license as specified on the permission form.
  • The student will receive an email with a persistent link to the submission when it is posted.

Policies

Copyright

Students retain ownership of the copyright for the content of their thesis or dissertation, including the right to use all or part of the content in future works. Students are encouraged to register the copyright to their work with the U.S. Copyright Office.

Students are solely responsible for obtaining the rights to use any third-party copyrighted materials, allowing electronic distribution, prior to submission.

Public access, embargoes, licenses, and subsequent publishing

The full text of theses and dissertations from the graduate schools are made publicly available in UMass Chan Medical School’s repository, eScholarship@UMassChan, unless the student has elected to postpone online access to the full text for a specified time (this is known as an embargo). Students may choose from the following embargo options: no embargo; 6 months; 1 year; 2 years and indicate their choice on the eScholarship Permission Form.

There is a record of each embargoed thesis/dissertation in eScholarship@UMassChan that displays the author name, title, abstract, publication year, academic program (Morningside students only), advisor, and department affiliations. The record also shows when the embargo will expire. Only the administrators of eScholarship@UMassChan can access the full text of the thesis/dissertation before the embargo expiration date.

Possible reasons to consider an embargo:

  • The student is applying for a patent on an invention or procedure documented in the thesis/dissertation and does not wish to make the contents public until the patent application has been filed
  • The thesis/dissertation contains sensitive and/or classified information
  • Immediate release of the thesis/dissertation may impact an existing or potential publishing agreement

Students often wonder if including unpublished data in a thesis or dissertation precludes later publication in peer-reviewed journals. As publisher policies on previous or duplicate publication vary, it is best to check with the publisher in question. Many publishers include this information on their websites. The MIT Libraries have compiled a helpful chart summarizing the policies of some publishers. UMass Chan students have the option of utilizing the embargo feature so that the full text of their dissertation is not publicly available while they are in the process of submitting manuscripts for publication in journals.  A recommended best practice is to disclose any prior publication or distribution of your manuscript (e.g. thesis/dissertation, preprint, meeting abstract) to the editor when submitting your manuscript to a journal.

If students do not request an embargo, or following the expiration of an embargo, the thesis/dissertation will be made publicly available in eScholarship@UMassChan and marked with “All Rights Reserved” or a Creative Commons license as specified by the student.

Creative Commons (CC) licenses are popular tools to facilitate knowledge sharing and creative innovation that copyright holders can apply to their works to indicate how they would like their materials to be used. Those who want to make their work available to the public for limited kinds of uses while preserving their copyright may want to consider using CC licenses. Students have three options to choose from and should select the option that best meets their goals:

  • Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY): This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
  • Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC): This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
  • Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved: This phrase indicates that the student, as the copyright holder, reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law, and that nothing may be done with a copyrighted work without their explicit permission.

Students and their thesis advisors should discuss and reach a mutual agreement regarding which embargo option and which Creative Commons license are appropriate. Conflicts between the wishes of the student and the advisor should be resolved before the student completes the eScholarship Permission Form.

The Creative Commons License Chooser is an interactive tool that is available to help select an appropriate license.

Students can direct questions about public access, copyright, embargoes, and subsequent publication to the library.

ORCID

Students are required to register for an ORCID and enter their ORCID ID on the eScholarship Permission Form. ORCIDs are unique author identifiers for researchers that are becoming integrated into research workflows. Your ORCID iD ensures you get credit for your work throughout your career and is increasingly a requirement for publication and funding. Registration is free and takes 30 seconds.

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)

Theses and dissertations deposited in eScholarship@UMassChan are assigned a DOI (Digital Object Identifier). DOIs are permanent unique identifiers assigned to publications, data, and other scholarly products that make it easier for them to be discovered, cited, and credited.

Sharing research data publicly

Students have many options for publicly sharing research data, including government-sponsored repositories such as GenBank or GEO, disciplinary repositories, third-party repositories, and established campus resources such as LabArchives and UMass Chan's institutional repository, eScholarship@UMassChan.

In thesis and dissertation manuscripts, students can include links to research data that has been permanently shared publicly, whether through deposit to a repository or published with a DOI through LabArchives. DOIs are permanent unique identifiers assigned to publications, data, and other scholarly products that make it easier for data to be discovered, cited, and credited. It is recommended that students use a DOI, if available, to link to research data from within their theses and dissertations. Both LabArchives and eScholarship@UMassChan have the ability to assign DOIs to datasets stored and shared with the software.

Students also have the option to upload research data as supplemental files when they are submitting their thesis or dissertation to eScholarship@UMassChan. Data files are displayed on the web page with the thesis or dissertation and download statistics are available.

In all cases, students should make sure that permanent, public data sharing is appropriate. Data should be documented so that it is easier to understand. Good data management practices should be followed, including using standard data and file formats, good null values, and basic quality control (see Ten Simple Rules for the Care and Feeding of Scientific Data).

Publication and post-publication edits

Theses and dissertations are published exactly as they are submitted. They are not edited, typeset, or retyped by the graduate school or the library. Therefore, the document’s appearance when it is accessed or printed is entirely the responsibility of the student. The student must assume responsibility for: preparing the document according to the graduate school guidelines for preparation of theses and dissertations; converting the document into Adobe PDF format; checking the document for appearance; and submitting the final, approved PDF document to eScholarship@UMassChan.

Once the graduate school has posted the thesis/dissertation on eScholarship@UMassChan, corrections or retractions cannot be made unless the student submits an official request to the Dean of the graduate school. Since this is the version of record, the full-text cannot simply be swapped out. Changes can be made to the metadata (descriptive information about the thesis/dissertation) but not to the full text. Upon graduate school approval, students will be allowed to upload another version which will display as an additional file, or to submit revised supplemental data as an additional file. The record will be amended to describe the actions/correction.

As the thesis/dissertation is the student’s intellectual property, only the student can initiate a cancellation or an extension of an approved embargo, or a change to a Creative Commons license, by submitting an official request to the Dean of the graduate school. The request should include the reason for the requested change and the desired length of time to extend the embargo. The library will process the extension in eScholarship@UMassChan after being notified of the Dean's approval.

Repository citation and download metrics

Posting your thesis/dissertation in eScholarship@UMassChan provides a permanent link and DOI that you can include on a resume or CV. A citation can be exported from the main page of each thesis/dissertation for citation management tools. Theses and dissertations are available immediately in Google, Google Scholar, and other search engines to maximize readership and impact of your scholarship. The number of full text downloads is updated daily. The download count is available from the thesis/dissertation main page by clicking "Show Statistical Information".

Binding

Binding of theses or dissertations is no longer a UMass Chan requirement by the graduate school or the library. The electronic versions will be the version of record. If the student’s department/committee chair requires a print copy, or the student wants print copies, binding arrangements and fees are the sole responsibility of the student. Interested students can consult the graduate school for a recommendation for a local bindery. If you have further questions, please contact the administrative office of the graduate school.

Removal of content

The full text of a work will generally be removed from eScholarship@UMassChan only for reasons such as unethical/ unsound science, plagiarism, copyright infringement, IRB non-compliance and/or violation of the Licensing Agreement. Removal requests should be sent to the graduate school Dean and should include the reason for removal. If the work is removed, a record describing the original version of the paper will always remain on the site at the same URL.