Dissertation & thesis writers

Many Tufts graduate students are required to submit completed dissertations or theses to ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. See your program's student handbook for more details. Dissertations and theses submitted to ProQuest will also be made openly available in Tufts Digital Library.

Embargoes

When you deposit to ProQuest, you can choose to delay the release of your dissertation or thesis in ProQuest and Tufts Digital Library by 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years. Once submitted, a record of your dissertation or thesis is still visible with information such as title, author, year, abstract, school, and subject area, but not the full text of your work.

The primary reasons you may want to embargo your work are pending patents or publications, privacy concerns, or sensitive information.

Extensions

To request an extension of your embargo, first contact Tufts Archival Research Center (TARC) to discuss your needs and embargo options. Depending on the request, you may need approval from your advisor or Dean. Once you've established a new embargo with TARC, contact ProQuest to update the embargo in their system using the contact form or chat options on their website, or at disspub@proquest.com.

Redacting information

Depending on the sensitive information contained in your thesis or dissertation, you and your advisor may decide it's more appropriate to redact the specific sensitive information and submit the redacted dissertation or thesis without an embargo if:

  • You acknowledge that your dissertation or thesis is redacted and you describe what kind of information was redacted
  • The redaction does not compromise your argument.

Publishing material from your thesis or dissertation

Incorporating previously published articles as chapters in a dissertation

If you transferred your copyright, check your publisher's policies. Many author agreements include statements allowing reuse of a published article in your dissertation or thesis. If yours doesn't, you should get in touch with the journal editor to obatin permission to reuse the article.

If you can’t find the author agreement you signed, you can find your journal in Jisc Open Policy Finder to see the typical author’s agreement for that journal before contacting your editor to explain the situation. You can also check out MIT Libraries' Thesis Content and Article Publishing for links to relevant policies for several publishers.

Publishing a book based on your dissertation

Talk to your advisor, others on your committee or in your department, or contact us to understand the publishing landscape in your field. Often publishers are not concerned if an earlier, unreviewed copy is deposited in an institutional repository, and having your work openly available should not hurt your chances of publication. You could also request an embargo to give yourself a little more time.

Open access options

Tufts libraries receive copies of all dissertations and theses submitted to ProQuest and load a copy into Tufts Digital Library. That copy is publicly available and you do not need to pay ProQuest to provide an open access copy. If you placed an embargo on your work, Tufts Digital Library will follow the same embargo.

With the traditional publishing option (non-open access) in ProQuest, ProQuest can sell copies of your dissertation or thesis and you, as the author, receive modest royalties from those sales.

Copyright considerations

Registering copyright to your thesis or dissertation

Your work is automatically copyrighted as soon as you write it, therefore it is not necessary to take any other steps to initiate your copyright. Nevertheless, there are reasons you might seek to formally register your work with the U.S. Office of Copyright. Registering provides a date-stamp, which can be useful in establishing primacy of your work. If your work is highly creative or you think it has potential to be reused or misused by others, you might want to register.

You can register your copyright at any time; it does not need to occur when submitting to ProQuest. However, the earlier you register your copyright, the more in statutory damages and attorney fees you are eligible for should you end up suing someone for violating your copyright. You need to register before you can sue someone, and if it was not registered earlier, you are limited to seeking only actual damages and no attorney fees.

ProQuest can register the copyright for you for a fee. Or you can register the copyright yourself for a smaller fee. 

Remember, this is not a required step – and it has nothing to do with your being the copyright holder. You are the copyright holder the moment you create your work.

Using work created by others in your thesis or dissertation

Using graphs, charts, images, and other work created by others may fall under fair use. Depending on the amount and type of material being used, it may be more appropriate to seek permission. If the material you want to use in your dissertation or thesis is in the public domain, you don’t need permission or a fair use assessment, but don’t forget to cite it!

Resources

Find school-specific resources for writing and submitting a thesis from your library: