Electronic Theses & Dissertations Center Frequently Asked Questions.

The ETD Center is a free, online database of Ohio's undergraduate, masters and doctoral theses and dissertations from participating OhioLINK member schools. It contains the abstract for all included theses and dissertations. The full-text is also available if it was submitted.

Retrieving a copy of a dissertation takes time and there is often a retrieval fee. The ETD Center eliminates the delay between searching and retrieving, giving researchers immediate access to the most current research occurring on Ohio campuses.

The ETD Center also provides more flexible publishing options. In addition to the standard PDF document format for text and diagrams, students can include music, video, and image files, increasing the strength and quality of many published theses and dissertations. Plus, electronic archiving in the statewide site eliminates the need for multiple physical storage facilities on each campus.
 

The ETD Center is freely accessible worldwide to anyone interested in searching, viewing, and downloading the theses and dissertations published in Ohio. Using a standard Web browser, users can search the database using basic keyword searching. Authors, university affiliation, and abstracts are all indexed.

In 1999, the Ohio graduate deans' group, the Regents Advisory Committee on Graduate Study (RACGS), asked OhioLINK to create a single, commonly shared ETD website to represent the work of Ohio's scholars. The ETD Center launched in 2001, as a joint project of OhioLINK and the Regents Advisory Committee on Graduate Study.

Only students from OhioLINK member institutions that are current ETD Center participants may submit their theses and dissertations. To find out if your institution is a participant, please contact your thesis office.

If you are a student at one of our participating OhioLINK member institutions, go to https://etdadmin.ohiolink.edu to sign up for a new account and login to create an ETD submission. You can save and return later to finish it, if needed. There's also a "Preview" button on the Review page that will give you a preview of what your published ETD will look like in the OhioLINK ETD Center. Once submitted, you can no longer make changes or edits so be sure to check it before clicking "Submit My ETD".

The OhioLINK ETD Center is a repository for complete, final theses and dissertations. Students should only submit their papers when their advisers have approved them or when instructed to do so by their thesis office. Once a paper is submitted to the ETD Center, the student's school may publish, edit, or reject the submission. Once published, it is usually not possible to make any changes to the thesis or dissertation, or to any other information supplied, but check with your graduate school.

Each institution sets its own requirements for electronic theses and dissertations. Please contact your thesis office for guidelines.

We accept multiple formats and multiple files per paper, such as a main PDF file with supplementary file(s) and a digital accessibility report. The list of acceptable formats, along with any requirements, is an institutional decision. As an overall rule, OhioLINK recommends file formats that are platform-independent, vendor-independent, non-proprietary, stable, and widely supported.

Upload restrictions for some file types were added in January 2025. HTML, XML, and JSON files are not accepted for file upload. Also, separate digital accessibility report files must be PDF, text file, or word document format.

If any issues occur with uploading file(s) during your ETD submission process, please contact your local ETD Administrator for assistance.

Each institution may have a set of defined requirements for print submission, but the common process is to use the OhioLINK ETD form to submit an electronic thesis or dissertation. Once the document has been submitted, your institution will be notified via e-mail. Upon approval, the document's bibliographic information, abstract, and full-text (if desired) are included for public use. With your institution's approval, you can select to have an embargo for a certain period of time on the full-text document. It is prohibited, however, to permanently restrict access only to your institution since the ETD Center's purpose is to be open access.

Your paper will reside in a secure location on the ETD website where it may only be accessed by your institution's ETD Administrator and ETD Reviewers. While there, the institution can modify or correct any of the submitted fields. Corrections can be made to names, dates, degrees, etc. The institution decides when a paper is approved, and the ETD system immediately moves the paper into the publicly accessible ETD Center or else holds it until the embargo date.

This can be controlled by the student and institution during the submission and approval processes. Papers designated for submission to ProQuest/UMI will be electronically forwarded to ProQuest/UMI through the ETD website once approved by the graduate school.

You are responsible for knowing if your school or program requires you to send your paper to ProQuest/UMI, requires you not to do so, or allows you to decide for yourself. This will be evident by the choices you are allowed during your ETD Center submission process.

When you submit your ETD to OhioLINK, you give OhioLINK and your institution permission to make your ETD available for open access on the Internet, including access through major Internet search engines.

Our publication agreement is found in the submission process. Please take a moment to read and understand it before submitting your ETD. The publication agreement outlines what OhioLINK and your institution may do with the copy of the ETD published in the ETD Center.

Ordinarily, your ETD will be published when your thesis office confirms the information in your submission and approves it for publication. Upon publication, your ETD will be freely available via the Internet from the OhioLINK ETD Center.

Some schools or departments allow you to request a publication delay until a specific date, called an embargo. This embargo can give you time to discuss future publication options, pursue patent applications, or address other proprietary interests before the full text of the ETD is made freely available from the ETD Center. Check with your program's office to determine their policies on publication delays and embargoes.

Some students prepare books based on, or related to, their theses and dissertations. If you think you might do this, you should check with publishers in your field to determine their policies about books based on Internet-accessible ETDs before submitting your ETD.

Some publishers consider open access ETDs to be previously published manuscripts and will not consider them for publication. This is most frequently the case in the arts and humanities, and is especially true of creative writing theses. If recommended by a publisher and allowed by your program, you may wish to request a publication delay while the publisher considers your book project.

Publishing an ETD on the Internet often leads to greater sales of books based on it. Indeed, having an electronic work available on the Internet, and showing a publisher a large number of electronic accesses to that work, may help you land a book contract.

Usually, books that relate to theses or dissertations turn out to be significantly changed as part of the editorial process. This makes it likely that those interested in your work will buy your book when it comes out, even if they have reviewed your ETD.

Copyright is a form of legal protection for original works of authorship, including works published online. Copyright applies to a work as soon as it is created in a tangible form, such as being saved to an electronic file. Your ETD is automatically protected by copyright, although you may choose the additional protection of registering your copyright. For further copyright information, please see the U.S. Copyright Office Frequent Asked Questions.

Copyright also protects any other authors' works included in your ETD. Please consult with your thesis office about when and how to document your permission to use such materials.

When you have your research published in a conference, book, or journal, you usually sign some type of agreement with the publisher. You should read that agreement carefully before signing, making sure you understand and agree with the terms and conditions. If you don't, you may want to change the agreement during discussion/negotiation with the publisher, and possibly with advice of legal or other counsel. The agreement should be explicit about what future rights of use you retain. If you want to include the materials in a dissertation or to reuse the materials for teaching or a book chapter, say so.

As the author you are entitled to discuss your plans with the publisher. During these negotiations you may want to discuss matters of timing and revision. You have the right to negotiate with a publisher to delay online publication of your ETD for a limited amount of time, if they request this as a condition on publishing your article, and if your thesis office allows this. However, most publishers consider a thesis or dissertation to be quite different from a journal article. Typically the article is much shorter than the chapter or full work, has been revised as a result of the editorial process and peer review, and sometimes has several authors, resulting in many publishers having no concern regarding fully accessible ETDs.

Material in the ETD Center is considered to be a record of completed work, and in most cases may not be edited after publication. In rare cases, exceptions may be made to correct substantial problems in an ETD that affect its content. Published ETDs are generally not corrected for misspellings or typographical errors. Please send all requests for corrections to your thesis office, not to OhioLINK.

Material in the ETD Center is considered a permanent part of a research collection, under publication terms agreed to during the submission process. OhioLINK does not remove a published ETD unless there are critical problems with its content or with the degree for which it was written, as directed by the degree-granting institution. Such problems include, but are not limited to, plagiarism, incorrect or misrepresented research results, failure to complete the degree, or revocation of the degree. Each institution has their own policies and protocols, so contact your graduate school or thesis office with any concerns.

You have several options for getting a hardbound copy of your electronic thesis or dissertation. If your paper was also uploaded to ProQuest/UMI, you may order bound copies from them. Another widely used online service is Thesis On Demand, which allows you to upload the PDF file of your paper, select binding options, and have the finished volume shipped to you. Depending on your location, local copy shops (including FedEx and UPS stores) or professional book binderies may also be able to work with your file.

Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) Identifier is a unique 16 digit number that helps distinguish one researcher from another, especially when names are similar, and serves as an online profile that can link to a researcher’s works, funding, professional website, and other useful information. To learn more, visit https://orcid.org

You can either sign-up now for an ORCID Identifier at the ORCID website https://orcid.org/register or during the ETD submission process for the ETD Center. If you already have an ETD submitted, you can login to the ETD Center and update your profile to add an ORCID Identifier.

There is no fee to join the ETD Center. As a current OhioLINK affiliated library, your institution can elect to have theses and dissertations submitted to the ETD Center.

Ohio's colleges and universities are invited to join and have their graduate students submit their theses and dissertations electronically to the ETD Center. To join the institutions already using the ETD Center, your graduate school/program needs to contact OhioLINK. The ETD Center accepts theses and dissertations from Masters and Ph.D. programs and from undergraduate honors thesis programs.

Send an email with a request to join or find out more information to support@ohiolink.edu and we will get you started.

The graduate school/program or honors thesis program at each participating institution develops its own set of procedures to handle training, submitting, cataloging, and archiving each submitted thesis or dissertation. For more information, see an example of guidelines online at https://grad.uc.edu/student-life/etd/formatting.html.

Also, OhioLINK has a listserv for member institutions using the ETD Center and serves as a great resource to ask others questions and find out about their policies and procedures as well as OhioLINK ETD updates and announcements. Sign up here: http://lists.osu.edu/mailman/listinfo/etd.

Institutions are free to submit and approve for use any papers for which they have the rights to do so and care to take the time to complete the submission process and supply the PDF file.

The general search box is a full-text keyword search. The words AND and OR (in uppercase) can be used to connect search terms and double quotes can group phrases. Capitalization of search terms does not affect the results.
Examples:

1. Lake Michigan
   Searches for the words Lake and Michigan
2. lake AND Michigan
   Searches the same way as the previous example
3. "Lake Michigan"
   Searches the exact phrase "Lake Michigan"
4. "lake AND Michigan"
   Searches the same way as previous
5. lake OR Michigan
   Searches for all ETD submissions containing either lake OR Michigan
6. Lake OR michigan
   Searches the same way as previous

ETDs and supplemental files are available to view and download from the OhioLINK ETD Center. All these files are virus checked regularly. If you are having trouble viewing or downloading a file you should check your browser settings and virus/security protection settings to allow viewing and downloading. 

The ETD Center does have a known issue that prevents the viewing and downloading of very large files. In these cases, you will see an "Oracle" error message. Please contact OhioLINK support for help.

If your user name is not being recognized, please check to make sure you are using your complete email address (including the @institution.edu portion) as your user name. Remember, it is the email address with which you signed up.

The ETD Administration application supports the current and immediately previous major version of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, and Mac-OS Safari.   For example, if the current version of Firefox is 19.0, then any 19.x or 18.x version are supported.

During submission, PDF files are checked to confirm they are not corrupted or otherwise broken. However, the large file sizes for some ETDs can cause two recurring problems. First, your Internet connection may go down while the file is transferring. If that happens, you will need to make sure the connection is back up and try opening the file again.

Second, the browser plug-in for Adobe Acrobat Reader may have problems with large files, especially when it is used with the Firefox web browser. If the browser plug-in cannot open the file, please download the PDF file to your desktop and open it from there. To download the file, right-click the ETD's 'Download Full Text' link and select the appropriate option, usually 'Save Target As' or 'Save Link As'.

Each full-text submission requires a PDF upload. Additional supplementary files can be uploaded as needed, once the work has a PDF. For example, a music performance submission could be a single-page PDF title page and a supplementary audio file with the recording.

Please only use file names that contain alphanumeric characters, periods, hyphens, and underscores--no spaces or other punctuation marks. We may need to rename files with any other characters.

They only way you can be sure that an uploaded PDF file is good is to download it again and scroll all the way through the document.

PDF/A is a standard that uses a subset of the PDF specification to help ensure a document's long-term archivability. A conforming file will be 100% self-contained. PDF/A uses the PDF 1.4 specification, and requires:

All fonts must be embedded, including the standard PostScript fonts such as Time or Helvetica, and standard Windows/Office fonts such as Times New Roman or Arial.

Any colorspaces defined for graphics must be device-independent

PDF/A prohibits:

Embedded audio or video

Embedded Javascript or other executable code

All file encryption or security settings

Whether or not you require PDF/A, it is a good idea to embed all fonts used in a PDF file. PDF allows you to embed either an entire font, or just the subset of a font that is actually used in a documents. This ensures that a reader will see the document's text rendered correctly, even if the reader's computer does not have the document's fonts installed, or has different versions installed.

OhioLINK does not require all fonts to be embedded, but strongly recommends it. ProQuest does require it, and ProQuest staff manually process ETDs with any fonts not embedded, adding to the overall processing time for that paper.

Since fonts are copyrighted files, embedding requires fonts whose licenses allow it. This information is usually displayed in your desktop system's font viewer (in Windows: Start>Control Panel>Appearance>Fonts)

Font embedding is typically an option in any program that generates PDF files, including Acrobat, and built-in converters in Microsoft Office and LibreOffice.

The two main options for attaching video or audio to an ETD are to embed it in the PDF file or to include it as one or more separate files. Embedding video in PDF is often easier, but is not allowed in the PDF/A long-term archiving format, and may not be viewable in PDF readers other than Acrobat Acrobat.

Please note that raw output from digital camcorders often creates unusably large files. Submitters will need to use video editing or conversion software to use a good codec and to change the video resolution as appropriate.

For video: video requires choices about both compression/decompression (codec) software used, and the file format used. We currently recommend the H.264 codec in AVI, MP4, or Matroska file formats; the Xvid codec in AVI or Matroska formats; or the Theora codec in the Ogg file format.

Special characters in ETD titles, abstracts, and author names need to be handled with care. This basically covers any character that is not part of a standard U.S. computer keyboard, plus the angle brackets and ampersand ("<", ">", and "&"). Any other character must be handled as it would be in a valid HTML 4 or XHTML 1 document, so any good HTML guide should help. See  http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/ for more details.