Submission Guidelines for Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing Dissertations

Submission Guidelines for Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing Dissertations

Contents

Benefits to UMass Chan students of archiving your 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 to ensure that formatting is correct, no required pages are missing, and their dissertation is properly converted to PDF format. Please make 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. The student should ensure that their dissertation is free of errors. Once the graduate school has posted the dissertation on eScholarship@UMassChan, corrections cannot be made unless the student submits an official request to the director of the PhD Program.
  3. Students and their thesis advisor should discuss and reach a mutual agreement regarding which embargo option is appropriate. See Public access, embargoes, licenses, and subsequent publishing for guidelines and a full explanation of options.
  4. The eScholarship Electronic Dissertation Permission Form must be filled out and signed electronically by the student and the dissertation committee chair. This form certifies that the manuscript is complete and has been approved by the student’s advisory committee, and designates the student’s embargo selection.
  5. Students are required to register for an ORCID and enter their ORCID ID on the eScholarship Electronic Dissertation 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 dissertation in PDF format (the title page must NOT include actual signatures of committee members)
  • Abstract
  • Keywords
  • Name of dissertation committee chair
  • Your eScholarship Electronic Dissertation Permission Form must first be completed and electronically signed by you and your dissertation committee chair
  • Supplemental files to be displayed on the web page with your dissertation (e.g. data sets, video clips, sound files), if applicable

How to submit

  • Log into eScholarship@UMassChan using your UMass Chan email address and password
  • Click the "Submissions" link in the left sidebar under "My Account"
  • Click on "start a new submission"
  • Select this collection: UMass Chan Student Research and Publications > Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing > Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing Dissertations
  • Fill in submission form and submit
  • NOTE: The Upload File(s) step on the submission form includes an Embargo field. Select a date based on the embargo option you and your committee chair chose on your eScholarship permission form. For example, for a 1-year embargo, select a date one year from the submission date. Skip this field if you are not requesting an embargo.

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 dissertation in eScholarship@UMassChan within 1-2 weeks of acceptance, with or without an embargo as specified by the student.
  • The student will receive an email with a persistent link to the submission when it is posted.

Published manuscripts of dissertation work

Students should inform the graduate school when manuscripts based on their dissertation research that have been submitted to journals are published. The graduate school will ask the library to include a link to the published journal article in the dissertation record.

Policies

Copyright

Students retain ownership of the copyright for the content of their dissertation, including the right to use all or part of the content in future works. Students are free 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 dissertations from the graduate school are made publicly available in UMass Chan Medical School’s repository, Scholarship@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 dissertation in eScholarship@UMassChan that displays the author name, title, abstract, publication year, 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 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 dissertation and does not wish to make the contents public until the patent application has been filed
  • The dissertation contains sensitive and/or classified information
  • Immediate release of the dissertation may impact an existing or potential publishing agreement

Students often wonder if including unpublished data in a 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. For example, Nature will consider submissions of material previously published in a thesis or dissertation. 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.

If students do not request an embargo, or following the expiration of an embargo, the dissertation will be made publicly available in eScholarship@UMassChan and marked with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. 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 use CC licenses. The Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 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 and is recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

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)

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 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 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 dissertation to eScholarship@UMassChan. Data files are displayed on the web page with the 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

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 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 dissertation on eScholarship@UMassChan, corrections or retractions cannot be made unless the student submits an official request to the director of the PhD program. 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 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 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 director of the PhD program. The request should include the reason for the requested change and the desired length of time to extend the embargo.

Repository citation and download metrics

Posting your 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 dissertation for EndNote, RefWorks, and other formats. 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 bottom of the dissertation main page by clicking "Show Statistical Information".

Binding

Binding of dissertations is not a UMass Chan requirement by the graduate school or the library. The electronic versions will be the version of record. If 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.

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 director of the PhD program 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.