Required Information

There are several descriptive fields that you must fill out in the submission form. Some of these fields will help other researchers find your thesis or dissertation and others will control when your thesis or dissertation will be made visible to the public.

Please ensure that all metadata, including your abstract, and your paper are finalized and adheres to the formatting requirements before submitting it.

Submission Checklist

Start this process after you have defended and made all final edits to your thesis or dissertation. Documents must be proofread and all errors corrected before beginning the submission process. Once published, changes cannot be made to your ETD.

  1. Carefully review the formatting requirements to make sure your document conforms to the requirements
  2. Contact etd-support@jhu.edu if you have any questions
  3. Save your document as a PDF/A file
  4. Login to the submission system using your JHED ID
  5. Enter the required descriptive fields
  6. Read and agree to the submission agreement
  7. Upload your PDF/A document
  8. Go to the fee payment site and pay your $60.00 fee
  9. If you receive an email asking for changes, follow the link and resubmit your corrected ETD
  10. If required, forward a copy of your approval email to your appropriate graduate office

PDF/A Export

PDF/A is an ISO-standardized version of the Portable Document Format (PDF) specialized for the digital preservation of electronic documents. You need to save your dissertation as a PDF/A file and upload it as your official submission. For more information, see the Wikpedia article on the format.

Note for Mac users: that while you can save a Word for Windows document as a PDF/A (see below for instructions) you cannot do so directly from Word for Mac. If you are a Mac user, consider saving your Word document as a PDF/A using a Windows computer, such as at the library, or use Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Notes about PDF/A format

  • you cannot include audio and video content; still images are fine
  • you cannot include JavaScript or executable files
  • fonts must be embedded

If you need to include audio, video, or other files, you can submit them as supplementary files. Contact us at etd-support@jhu.edu for more help with PDF/A or supplementary files.

Adobe Acrobat Pro

  • Select the “Preflight” function on the edit menu
  • Choose “Convert to PDF/A-1b”.

Word for Windows

  • Click “file” then “save as PDF”
  • Make sure file type is “pdf files”
  • Click on Options and a box with “PDF Options” will open
  • Check the “Create PDF/A” box, then click “OK” and “Save”.

LaTeX

Fee Payment

The ETD submission fee is $60 and may be paid by credit card or by funds transfer from your department. The fee is due at the time of submission; payment verification is required for approval.

Pay by Credit Card – $60

IMPORTANT: If the card you are using is not your own (e.g., spouse or parent’s card), proceed with the payment at the site, but then email your name, your JHED ID, and the name of the credit card owner to etd-support@jhu.edu so we can link your submission with the payment.

Pay by Department Funds Transfer

NOTE: This option is available at departmental discretion. Request that the department administrator fill out the PDF form and submit it to etd-support@jhu.edu.

Embargoes

You have the option of making your ETD publicly available within a few months following degree conferral, or placing an embargo on your ETD. Embargoes temporarily delay publication of your ETD to JHU’s institutional repository, JScholarship.

Students choose to place embargoes on their work if their ETD forms part or all of a larger work that they plan to publish with a journal or publishing company, and that organization has a policy against publication of previously published work.

Note: Most publishing companies with these policies make exceptions for theses and dissertations, so be sure to read the documentation carefully before choosing to put an embargo on your ETD.

JScholarship

Students may choose between embargo options of 1, 2, 3, or 4 years. During the embargo period, metadata about the ETD (author, title, abstract, etc.) will still be available to the public through JScholarship, but the text of the ETD will not be available.

If a student initially chooses to place an embargo on their ETD and later wishes to lift the embargo early, they may contact us in order to do so.

If a student initially chooses an embargo of less than the maximum 4 years allowed, and later wishes to extend the embargo before their ETD has been made publicly accessible on JScholarship, they may do so, so long as the embargo does not extend past 4 years from the original submission approval date. For instance, if a student submits their ETD in 2018 and places a 2 year embargo on it, they may later choose to extend the embargo for another 1-2 years, but may not extend the embargo past 2022.

ProQuest

JHU offers to submit ETDs to ProQuest on behalf of doctoral students only. JHU does not submit any masters theses on behalf of students to ProQuest. If a student later wishes to change their embargo options for ProQuest, check with us to confirm if we’ve already sent your dissertation to ProQuest. If so, the student is responsible for contacting ProQuest themselves to change the embargo, the library does not facilitate this.

Contact ETD Office

Milton S. Eisenhower Library
etd-support@jhu.edu