- Doctor of Philosophy
- Ad Hoc Degree Programs
- Dissertations
- Acknowledging the Work of Others
- Dissertation Advisory Committee
- Formatting Your Dissertation
- Publishing Options
- Subject, Invention, and Patents
- Submitting Your Dissertation
- Distribution of Dissertation
- Making Your Dissertation Publicly Available
- Licensing Agreements
Distribution of the Dissertation
Students are given a variety of options regarding the distribution of their work. Upon final approval, the dissertation is distributed based on the permissions and publishing options students select during the ProQuest ETD submission process.
Making Your Dissertation Publicly Available
PhD dissertations are made openly available as proof of the candidate’s achievement, echoing a traditional European idea that the candidate for a doctorate must make a contribution to knowledge and cannot have a degree for making a discovery that is kept secret. Because of this, restricting access to dissertations or delaying the release of the work (i.e. “embargoed”) only occurs in very exceptional cases.
Embargoes (Delaying Open Release)
If necessary, students may request to embargo their work for six months, one year, two years, or more. Up to a two-year embargo can be chosen during submission with no additional permissions; embargo periods over two years require additional support from the student’s director of graduate studies (DGS). An embargo period can be selected in the "PQ Publishing Options" and "IR Publishing Options" sections of ProQuest ETD. If students would like to request a delayed release of their dissertation of longer than two years, they will be prompted to upload a signed document to the “Administrative Documents” section showing the director of graduate study's approval of this request. If students do not have a document when submitting their dissertation, they will be asked to have the DGS email the Registrar's Office, acknowledging approval of the delayed-release request.
Regardless of the length of the embargo, the full text of the dissertation is not openly accessible, however, the metadata associated with the work (general information about the dissertation recorded at the time of online submission) and the abstract will remain publicly available. Please note:
- It is not necessary to embargo a dissertation for patenting purposes once a patent application has been filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. At that point, any invention may be disclosed publicly without a loss of patent rights. (See the Patents page for more information).
Licensing Agreements
When submitting work through ProQuest ETD, students are asked to agree to two distribution licenses: the Harvard Author Agreement, which grants the University a non-exclusive license to preserve, reproduce, and display the work in DASH, and the ProQuest distribution license, which grants ProQuest a non-exclusive license to preserve, reproduce, display, collect royalties against, collect data on use, and repurpose your work in text-similarity software.
Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard
The Harvard Author Agreement, which is similar to licensing under the FAS faculty open-access policies, does not constrain your rights to subsequently publish your work. Through ProQuest ETD, dissertations are made available online through the Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) portal, a central, open-access repository of research by members of the Harvard community. DASH makes your dissertation available to anyone at no cost. In the Publishing Information section of ProQuest ETD, students must review and accept the Harvard License Agreement to acknowledge distribution of their dissertation through DASH, pursuant to any embargo placed on the work in the submission tool.
Deposit to the Harvard Library
In addition to your work being made available in DASH, dissertations are added to the collections of the Harvard University Archives, digitally preserved within the Harvard Library and discoverable through the Harvard Library catalog.
ProQuest
Students are also required to consent to the ProQuest license agreement, and dissertations are automatically added to ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. As part of the license agreement, ProQuest may sell student dissertations; if authors do not want any sales of their dissertation, they may permanently embargo it with ProQuest either with approval from their program or by contacting ProQuest after submission. The agreement further allows ProQuest to distribute copies of the dissertation in microfilm, paper, and digital forms by way of thesis subscription, sales, and indexing services pursuant to any embargo. Finally, the ProQuest publishing agreement is non-exclusive and in no way prohibits the author from making any disposition of other manuscript copies, nor does it prohibit the author from publishing the dissertation at any time. (Please see ProQuest license and copyright considerations.)
