Academic Senate Policy and Student Responsibility for Dissertations, DMA Supporting Documents, and Theses

Academic Senate Policy and Student Responsibility for Dissertations, DMA Supporting Documents, and Theses

Doctoral dissertations/supporting documents and master’s theses submitted to UCSB must meet the requirements set by Graduate Council for the degree candidate to be eligible for a graduate degree*. A doctoral dissertation must be the result of original research conducted in the candidate’s specialization and must be approved in its entirety by the student’s doctoral committee. A DMA supporting document must be a written document that demonstrates evidence of scholarly research, all judged satisfactory by the doctoral committee. A master’s thesis must be a significant research work and must be approved in its entirety by the master’s committee. For the remainder of this guide, “dissertation” will refer to all doctoral degrees, including DMA.

Students and their committee members are responsible for everything contained in the manuscript. The complete master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation must be submitted to the members of the student’s supervising committee for their review and final approval. This includes all preliminary pages or front matter (e.g., dedication, acknowledgements, abstract), the main body of text (including any charts or other inserted matter), and the back matter (e.g., the notes and bibliography, any appendices). It is the responsibility of all committee members to read the entire content of the manuscript before approving. Nothing can be added once the committee has given final approval as indicated by their signatures on the signature page.

Students should electronically file (e-file) the thesis or dissertation only when it is completed and approved in its entirety by all their committee members. This means making the revisions requested by supervising committee members prior to obtaining final signatures and electronically filing the document.

Once the Graduate Division has accepted the e-filed document, it is final and cannot be changed. Students and committee members are responsible for ensuring that all standards of publication (including fair use** , copyrighting, patents, and publication rights) and all standards of research are met, including, where appropriate, approval of the Human Subjects Committee (contact the Office of Research at 805-893-3807) or approval of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee [IACUC] (contact IACUC@lifesci.ucsb.edu).

Per Graduate Council policy, master’s theses and doctoral dissertations must be published through ProQuest Information and Learning using microfilm and electronic means. As such, students grant ProQuest the non-exclusive right to reproduce and distribute their theses or dissertations in and from microfilm and in and from an electronic format. Students also grant ProQuest the non-exclusive right to reproduce and distribute their abstracts in any format in whole or in part. Students may grant other publication rights as they wish in other forms – hard or soft cover, posters, screenplay, etc.

ProQuest keeps a master microfilm of each thesis and dissertation deposited with them, offers copies of the documents for sale, and publishes an abstract of the document in Masters Abstracts International or Dissertation Abstracts International (available on the Internet). ProQuest pays a royalty on sales of copies of the thesis or dissertation. ProQuest may use third party agencies to collect orders for theses and dissertations, but ProQuest fills the orders. During the e-filing process, students choose whether or not to allow third party sales of their document. Authors retain all rights to their theses and dissertations, and sales are tracked for royalty payments.

It is the policy of UCSB to deposit all electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) at the UCSB Library. The ETDs will be archived in the Library’s institutional repository (IR), Alexandria Digital Research Library (ADRL), and will be accessible to patrons visiting the Library. For additional information, please review the UCSB Library Publishing Agreement as well as ProQuest’s Authors website.