Students/candidates submit their dissertations and theses via ProQuest ETD Administrator, which is the platform used by the Graduate Division for managing the submission of dissertations and theses. Uploading a dissertation or thesis here involves filling out several pages of information, making choices for the dissertation or thesis, agreeing to policies, and uploading file(s). Some optional services through ProQuest incur fees. Students/candidates may submit their dissertation without incurring any costs by not selecting ProQuest's open access (because eScholarship does this freely), copyright registration (optional in general and possible to do on your own), or print copies (not required and up to you) in ProQuest’s system – all three of those are optional and/or achievable in other ways. (More on Open Access and Copyright in the following sections.)

Per the aforementioned UC-wide Policy on Open Access for Theses and Dissertations, UCSC theses and dissertations must be open access, either immediately or following an embargo period (see the next section for more on embargoes).

Please note that it is not necessary to pay the ProQuest fee for open access publication because dissertations and theses are also uploaded as open access (OA) automatically and freely in eScholarship. 

The mechanism by which dissertations and theses by UCSC graduate students/candidates are made openly available is UC’s repository publishing platform called eScholarship. Once students submit copies of their dissertations and theses to ProQuest ETD Administrator, the dissertations and theses are also automatically routed to eScholarship. 

Open access (OA) means that a dissertation or thesis is openly available online for anyone to read and download for free. Authors also have the option of sharing their work under an open license, which generally enables others to re-use the work to the degree specified by the selected license (learn more about licenses on our Copyright guide).

An embargo means that the full text of a dissertation or thesis is unavailable to read for a specific period of time. When a dissertation is embargoed, a record about the work will still be visible in the eScholarship repository, UC Library Search, ProQuest databases, and any places that index these sources, but not the work itself. In other words, even with an embargo, the information about the thesis or dissertation – title, year of publication, author, advisor(s), abstract, embargo expiration date, and citation – are all visible, but the content of the dissertation or thesis is not. 

An embargo of a dissertation or thesis is a time-limited restriction of up to two years, and any additional time must be requested. Once an embargo expires, the full text is open access online. 

Not sure whether or why you need an embargo or not? Reasons can include: 

• pending other publication(s), 
• pending patent(s), 
• grant or contract obligation(s), or 
• publication contract(s). 

Sensitive material or copyrighted material by others exceeding fair use within the thesis or dissertation may also be reasons, but these concerns usually remain when a dissertation/thesis embargo expires, so it is best to find other ways to address concerns about sensitive information or copyright infringement. If you have questions, please talk with your advisor and/or reach out to the Library at research@library.ucsc.edu. 

To add an embargo when first submitting a dissertation or thesis via ProQuest ETD Administrator, which is the Graduate Division’s platform for collecting dissertations and theses, students/candidates may select immediate publication -or- an embargo of six months, one year, or two years. Two years is the maximum amount of time that a student/candidate may initially request for an embargo.

To request an embargo extension, which depends upon the decision of the UCSC Division of Graduate Studies, please reach out to gss-group@ucsc.edu a month before your embargo expires. If an embargo extension is approved, the Graduate Division will communicate the new embargo term to the Library, and the Library will apply it in eScholarship. The embargo extension may also need to be made in ProQuest’s databases. Embargo requests made directly to the Library will be referred to the Graduate Division.

Copyright law is the same for dissertations and theses as it is for other types of publications. The following resources may be especially helpful: 

• Check out the Library’s Copyright guide. 
• Consider fair use when using other people’s work, such as quotations or images. 
• Decide whether to apply a Creative Commons license to your dissertation or thesis. 
• Refer to “Common Copyright Concerns of Students Writing Theses or Dissertations” for more on specific questions that may come up when you are writing a dissertation or thesis. 

Please reach out to the Library at research@library.ucsc.edu or schedule a copyright one-on-one meeting with a librarian if you have questions.

Copyright Registration

Copyright registration makes copyright ownership officially and publicly recorded. Whether or not authors register their copyright, authors have immediate copyright as soon as a creative, original work, like a dissertation or thesis, is created and fixed (i.e., exists in a digital or physical format). Registration is not a requirement to hold copyright on a work, though it is necessary for suing someone for copyright infringement.

If a student/candidate chooses to register a dissertation or thesis, they may:

• Register it themselves with the US Copyright Office in the online registration portal for a fee of $45 (as of 2025) for one work, not made for hire, by one author, according to the fee circular, or
• Elect to have ProQuest ETD Administrator register copyright on their behalf for a fee of $75 (as of 2025). 

See p. 5 of this US Copyright Office circular and “What are the Benefits of Copyright Registration?” by the Copyright Alliance for more information as you consider this decision. Generally, students do not pay the fee to register, but if they are worried about copyright infringement, they may.

Some authors revise or use large parts of their dissertation or thesis wholesale in other publications. In some disciplines, it is common practice for students to re-work their dissertation or thesis into a scholarly article or even part of a book. See the following publisher pages for their description of these practices:

• Taylor & Francis provides tips on how to successfully turn dissertations into articles.
• Sage, Springer, and Elsevier show that reuse of articles in a thesis or dissertation is a common right of authors.

Because this interchange is a well-known practice, and often explicitly allowed in publishers’ contracts with authors, it rarely raises copyright concerns. eScholarship, which hosts UCSC dissertations and theses, has not received a takedown notice from a publisher based on a complaint that the author’s dissertation or thesis was too similar to the author’s published work. Still, authors may consider an embargo when the content from their dissertation or thesis has not yet been published elsewhere yet (see the section on Embargoes for Dissertations or Theses).

For books based on dissertations or theses, the general consensus is that a dissertation or thesis needs to undergo revision to become a book because books have a different audience and purpose than dissertations or theses. UC Press offers a recording of a 2024 webinar on the dissertation-to-book process. Author Laura Portwood-Stacer shares resources on the process of editing a dissertation for a book (as well as a newsletter and books on the book publishing process).

The Graduate Division reviews and approves the formatting for dissertations and theses. Please refer to the Graduate Handbook for the Dissertation and Thesis Preparation Guidelines.