Category Archives: Dissertations

Revised Dissertation Embargo Policy in Effect

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The new pol­icy for the Pub­li­ca­tion, Access, and Embar­go­ing of Doc­toral Dis­ser­ta­tions, which was approved on May 14, 2012, is now in full effect.

The new pol­icy enables each grad­u­ate stu­dent to request a two-year embargo on his or her dis­ser­ta­tion, with the poten­tial for renewal. When approved, the embargo applies to the dissertation’s avail­abil­ity in Pro­Quest, as well as in Princeton’s dig­i­tal repos­i­tory, Data­Space. If not embar­goed, dis­ser­ta­tions are made avail­able in full-text to sub­scrib­ing insti­tu­tions via Pro­Quest, and in full-text on the Inter­net through DataSpace.

Indi­vid­u­als who sub­mit­ted their dis­ser­ta­tions between Sep­tem­ber 29, 2011 and June 19, 2012 had an oppor­tu­nity to request an embargo retroac­tively. They were con­tacted by email on June 19, 2012 (and again on Sep­tem­ber 7, 2012) and given until Octo­ber 15, 2012 to request approval for their embargo. The dis­ser­ta­tions that were not embar­goed dur­ing this period were released to uni­ver­sal acces­si­bil­ity via Data­Space on Novem­ber 5, 2012.*

The process of gain­ing approval for an embargo is gov­erned by the Grad­u­ate School. Stu­dents who wish to embargo their dis­ser­ta­tion should fill out the Dis­ser­ta­tion Embargo Request and Approval Form, obtain an approval sig­na­ture from their advi­sor or a com­mit­tee mem­ber, and sub­mit the form as part of the Advanced Degree Appli­ca­tion Process. Writ­ten con­fir­ma­tion of the embargo approval from the Grad­u­ate School must be pre­sented in hard copy at the time of sub­mis­sion to the Mudd Man­u­script Library.

Details about sub­mit­ting your dis­ser­ta­tion to the Mudd Man­u­script Library are here: http://www.princeton.edu/~mudd/thesis/index.shtml

*As an interim mea­sure while the new pol­icy was being devel­oped, on March 23, 2012, all dis­ser­ta­tions that had been deposited in Data­Space in the fall of 2011 were restricted to the Prince­ton net­work. Those sub­mit­ted in the spring of 2012 were also lim­ited to the Prince­ton net­work. All dis­ser­ta­tions from Sep­tem­ber 29, 2011 and for­ward that were not embar­goed were released uni­ver­sally via Data­Space on Novem­ber 5, 2012.

Dissertations in Dataspace policy temporarily changed

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The Grad­u­ate School’s pol­icy of hav­ing dis­ser­ta­tions sub­mit­ted into Data­Space, the University’s Open Access repos­i­tory, has been changed tem­porar­ily, pend­ing res­o­lu­tion of some out­stand­ing ques­tions. David Red­man, Asso­ciate Dean of the Grad­u­ate School, sent the fol­low­ing mes­sage out late today. If you have any ques­tions, :

Dear Direc­tors of Grad­u­ate Studies,

As many of you know, the Grad­u­ate School, work­ing with the Uni­ver­sity Archives, estab­lished last fall new pro­ce­dures for the sub­mis­sion of Ph.D. dis­ser­ta­tions to Pro­Quest. Two sig­nif­i­cant changes were: a) agree­ing to use ProQuest’s Elec­tronic The­ses and Dis­ser­ta­tions (ETD) sub­mis­sion por­tal, which greatly speeded the abil­ity of stu­dents to sub­mit their dis­ser­ta­tions; and b) elim­i­nat­ing the neces­sity of a sec­ond hard-bound copy of the dis­ser­ta­tion in favor of stor­ing an elec­tronic copy of the dis­ser­ta­tion on Princeton’s Data­Space and mak­ing the elec­tronic “sec­ond copy” acces­si­ble there. One con­se­quence of the sec­ond change was that our stu­dents’ dis­ser­ta­tions became almost instantly acces­si­ble to any­one with a good search engine. In short, Prince­ton dis­ser­ta­tions were “out there” in the world faster than we had imag­ined. This has caused some anx­i­ety and dis­tress among many of our new Ph.D.’s, so much so that we are amend­ing our pro­ce­dures in the fol­low­ing way.

By the end of this month, we will restrict access to doc­toral dis­ser­ta­tions in Data­Space to those on the Princeton.edu domain, that is, to on-campus users.

This is an interim and (we hope) rel­a­tively short term address to a larger prob­lem of easy and fast access to Ph.D. dis­ser­ta­tions at a time when stu­dents, par­tic­u­larly those in the human­i­ties and social sci­ences, are anx­ious about their oppor­tu­ni­ties to pub­lish their work and advance in their careers. The Grad­u­ate School has already had pre­lim­i­nary dis­cus­sion with some mem­bers of the Pol­icy Sub­com­mit­tee about this issue and wants to con­tinue the dis­cus­sion with them about refin­ing our poli­cies and procedures.

Thank you for your inter­est in and con­cern about this issue. If you have any ques­tions, please do not hes­i­tate to call (x8-3902) or write me ().

–David Red­man
Asso­ciate Dean

UPDATE: As of today, March 23, dis­ser­ta­tions in Data­Space are now restricted to on-campus users only. How­ever, please note that if Google has cached a PDF that it crawled pre­vi­ously, that PDF will remain in Google’s cache until Google expires it. That typ­i­cally takes a cou­ple of weeks, but that’s entirely up to Google.

UPDATE: As of Novem­ber 5, all dis­ser­ta­tions that have not been granted an embargo are avail­able via Dataspace.

Modernization of Dissertation Submission Procedures

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One of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ impor­tant roles is to pre­serve and pro­vide access to Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Ph.D. dis­ser­ta­tions and Master’s the­ses. Recently the Mudd Man­u­script Library has taken steps to both mod­ern­ize and stream­line the process that Ph.D. can­di­dates carry out to sub­mit their dis­ser­ta­tions, while at the same time improv­ing access to these works.

Part­ner­ing with ProQuest

Since 1950, the Uni­ver­sity has part­nered with Pro­Quest (for­merly UMI) to pub­lish and dis­sem­i­nate the work of Princeton’s Ph.D. stu­dents to the wider aca­d­e­mic com­mu­nity. After decades of mail­ing bound man­u­scripts to Pro­Quest for micro­film­ing and/or scan­ning, and more recently, mail­ing CDs with PDFs of dis­ser­ta­tions, Prince­ton Ph.D. can­di­dates will now upload their own PDFs to Princeton’s ETD Admin­is­tra­tor site (www.etdadmin.com/princeton). Can­di­dates will choose pub­lish­ing options, decide if they want Pro­Quest to reg­is­ter their copy­right, and pay any rel­e­vant fees on the site as well.

Reduced Cost for Students

The new online sub­mis­sion sys­tem allows can­di­dates to real­ize sig­nif­i­cant sav­ings in pub­lish­ing fees—Traditional pub­lish­ing is free and Open Access pub­lish­ing is $95—in both cases, a sav­ings of $25 over the pre­vi­ous process. The optional copy­right reg­is­tra­tion fee remains $55, and a dis­ser­ta­tion main­te­nance fee of $15 is due at the Mudd Man­u­script Library at the time of submission.

In addi­tion, with the new pro­ce­dure, can­di­dates are required to sub­mit only one bound copy of their dis­ser­ta­tion to the library (instead of two), which cuts their bind­ing fees in half, a sav­ings of $40 or more.

Enhanced Access to Dissertations

Depend­ing on the pub­lish­ing option that can­di­dates choose, dis­ser­ta­tions will be made avail­able either through ProQuest’s Dis­ser­ta­tions and The­ses sub­scrip­tion data­base (avail­able to the Uni­ver­sity com­mu­nity at http://search.proquest.com/pqdtft/advanced?accountid=13314) or through ProQuest’s open access data­base PQDT Open (http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/), which offers full text ver­sions of dis­ser­ta­tions to any­one with Inter­net access.

Another step for­ward in pro­vid­ing access to dis­ser­ta­tions is their avail­abil­ity on Princeton’s dig­i­tal repos­i­tory, Data­Space http://dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/. Start­ing with dis­ser­ta­tions sub­mit­ted for the Novem­ber 2011 degree award, an elec­tronic copy of each Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity dis­ser­ta­tion will be placed in Data­Space. This will be a full text, uni­ver­sally acces­si­ble ver­sion of the dissertation.

More Infor­ma­tion

Full details of the new dis­ser­ta­tion sub­mis­sion pro­ce­dures are avail­able on our web­site at: http://www.princeton.edu/~mudd/thesis/index.shtml . If you have ques­tions about the dis­ser­ta­tion sub­mis­sion process, please con­tact the Mudd Man­u­script Library at 609–258-6345 or .