Thesis Submission Cheat Sheet (Updated 92015) This quick guide was compiled by students that have gone through the thesis submission process and is meant to answer questions about the process, which can be confusing and is not well documented. It is by no means exhaustive and is not an official source of information. Also, information may change over time and this is not guaranteed to be the most up to date information. Some official information about the process can be found in the Graduate Student Handbook . If you have questions or a special situation that is not addressed here, you should check with your advisor or department administrator. First, students need to apply for graduation. This can be done online through the SIS system. Click on the ‘Academics’ tab and then select ‘Apply for Graduation.’ In the handbook it says that you need to hand deliver a hard copy of the application for graduation, but we are pretty sure this is bogus. Next, you write your thesis. The formatting requirements and what not can be found in the Graduate Student Handbook (p25 of the 20152016 edition). Look through these and make sure that you follow all of the requirements. In your final submission you will not need the signatures of your committee members. It is recommended that you finish your thesis in midMarch for May graduations to give your committee time to review and make edits, but no one is ever ready by then. It would be nice, but never really happens. The final due date is at the end of April, and most people usually send a draft to their committee a couple weeks before they defend, so early to midApril. You will also receive an email with the Exit Survey in it. You must complete this survey before graduating. Finally, there are two forms, the ‘Approval of Thesis’ and ‘Certification of Fitness’ forms which historically have been taken care of by the department administrator, but since we have a new one this year, it may be worth checking in about these. Now to the actual thesis submission. Tufts uses a third party (ProQuest) to handle the publishing of theses. This means that you must go to the ProQuest thesis submission page for Tufts and follow the steps. Plan on this part taking between 30 minutes and an hour (although with our help hopefully it will take less). We will highlight some of the key questions that you will need to answer. 1. Once you get to the ProQuest submission page you will need to create an account. You will have to provide information about yourself including a home address where they can reliably reach you at least for the next month or two. Follow the instructions to begin a new thesis submission.
2. It will ask you to select a style of publishing, either ‘Traditional’ or ‘Open Access.’ You have to decide what you want to do. Traditional is free, and open access cost ~$100. a. With Traditional Publishing ProQuest is essentially selling your thesis. If someone wants to read it, they have to buy it from ProQuest. You will get 10% royalties from the sales as long as you maintain a current address with ProQuest and provided that someone buys it at least every 4 years. They will start paying royalties once you have accrued $25 worth. b. As the name implies Open Access Publishing makes your thesis freely available to download. ProQuest covers their costs by having you pay a fee of ~$100 up front. One advantage of this is that it makes it easy for others to view your work, and therefore more likely to be read, and maybe even cited (the holy grail), but as stated, it cost money 3. Next, it will ask you to upload the document (after filling out some basic information). You will have to fill out information including the title, advisor, committee members, abstract, and keywords. Your abstract is supposed to be 150 words or less for a Masters and 350 words or less for a PhD, but they may or may not check that. Also, you should choose a few keywords that relate to your work. This will help people find your thesis when they are searching. When you upload your thesis, they want you to upload a PDF. This guarantees that the formatting and equations appear properly. You can upload a word document, but a PDF is preferable. 4. The next difficult question relates to the copyright. Basically it asks if you want to file for a copyright on the work through ProQuest for ~$60 or not. We are not lawyers, but as we understand it, you have a copyright on the work when you write it. What they are asking is whether you would like to register your copyright. If you do, it basically gives you some leverage and legal recourse in case someone plagiarizes your work. If you don’t register your copyright you are only eligible for “statutory damages” and your attorney fees will not be covered, whereas if you do register you are eligible for “actual damages” and attorney fees up to something like $150k. Check this link . 5. Finally, it asks if you want to buy a bound copy of your thesis. There are a number of different size options. The standard 8.5x11 hardcover cost ~$50 each. 6. After checking everything over, you can now hit the submit button. If you have a problem or need to change something, you can do it. A number of previous students have had to do this, and it was not too hard. There is a person that handles these situations and you should receive an email with their contact info.