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Dissertation Format and Submission

Dissertation formatting & submission requirements

The University of Houston-Clear Lake requires all dissertations to be published as part of each student's graduation. Dissertations are to be submitted through the Vireo Thesis & Dissertation Submission System at https://uhcl-etd.tdl.org/. Electronic copies of dissertations will be open access and globally available through the Neumann Library Institutional Repository at https://uhcl-ir.tdl.org/uhcl-ir/, hosted by the Texas Digital Library. Print dissertations are not required and will not be accepted.

Before submission, you are required to conform to all formatting requirements, embed fonts and convert your document to PDF, and scan and save the signed signature page. See the full Format & Submission Guidelines for Dissertations below.

Preparing to Submit Your Dissertation

You will need to embed your fonts inside your Microsoft Word document, and then convert the document to a PDF file (you will still be able to retain the Word file as a separate document). Do not submit your Word document in Vireo.

Please use one of the below documents to help you complete this step.

Name the document file with the following three elements in all capital letters, separated by a hyphen: year of graduation, semester of graduation, DOCTORALDISSERTATION, your last name. For instance:

2021-FALL-DOCTORALDISSERTATION-WILLIAMS.pdf

You will need to scan one of your signature pages to be uploaded in Vireo along with your dissertation. The signed signature page should be saved as a separate PDF from the dissertation PDF. The Neumann Library has scanners that are free to use, and we will be happy to help you with this step if needed.

Name the signature page file with the following three elements in all capital letters, separated by a hyphen: year of graduation, semester of graduation, DISSERTATIONSIGNATUREPAGE, your last name. For instance:

2021-FALL-DISSERTATIONSIGNATUREPAGE-WILLIAMS.pdf

This page will be archived, but will not be publicly available to protect the signatures of the signing parties. The signature page with blank signature lines will be used in the publicly available version.

 

This step is optional but highly encouraged.

Register for an ORCID ID at http://orcid.org/. Registration is free.

ORCID provides a persistent numeric identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher. ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers.

Connect your ORCID ID to your thesis or dissertation so that users can easily locate your work in cases of:

  • name ambiguity: other authors have the same or similar name as you
  • name variants:
    • inconsistent use of initials across publications (e.g., Katherine Patterson, K. Patterson, K.E. Patterson)
    • use of different names across publications (e.g., maiden name or other name change)
    • misspelling of name by publisher or indexing service

All dissertations will eventually be available to the public. At the time of submittal in Vireo, you have the option to release the manuscript immediately, or to embargo (delay) the full-text availability for a limited time for publishing/patenting purposes. You may embargo your dissertation for either 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years. If you do not choose to embargo the dissertation, it will be made available within a month after graduation. 

Generally, in order to publish journal articles or books from your dissertation or thesis, the publisher will require significant revisions; for instance, the language may need to be condensed and modified to suit the journal's reader base, the format will need to conform to the publisher's specifications, and the peer reviewers may suggest rewriting or rethinking portions of the work. For these reasons, many publishers do not regard theses and dissertations as prior publications, and will publish articles and books based on those works without requiring the dissertation to be embargoed. Review the policies of publishers you intend to work with, and speak with your Committee Chair.

You are the copyright owner of your thesis or dissertation, regardless of whether you choose to register it with the U.S. Copyright Office. As copyright owner, you have a bundle of rights, enumerated in the United States Copyright Law

When submitting your thesis or dissertation, you are asked to agree to a license to grant the Texas Digital Library, UHCL, and your academic department "the non-exclusive rights to copy, display, perform, distribute and publish the content I submit to this repository...and to make the Work available in any format in perpetuity as part of a TDL, Institution or Department repository communication or distribution effort."

Non-exclusive rights allow us to archive, preserve, and make your work available but do not give us ownership over your work. You retain copyright of your work, and can still exercise all of your rights under copyright. Because the license is non-exclusive, you still have the right to publish the work yourself, or transfer exclusive rights to another publisher.

See this Copyright FAQ for general information about copyright: link will be provided

Using materials copyrighted by others
If you use copyrighted material in your dissertation beyond the extent covered by fair use, you must obtain the written permission of the copyright holder and upload the permission letter with your dissertation. 

Using your previously publications in your ETD
If you have already published portions of your dissertation as articles or book chapters and assigned copyright to the publisher, you must obtain copyright release to include that portion in your dissertation. That permission must be submitted with the dissertation as a supplemental document. An acknowledgement of any previous publication must also be included.

Submitting Your Dissertation

Log-in to Vireo at https://uhcl-etd.tdl.org/ using your UHCL username and password. Please contact the Support Center at 281-283-2828 or SupportCenter@uhcl.edu for login issues.

Please watch the video below for submission instructions. For technical assistance using Vireo, contact the Texas Digital Library. For questions relating to format or submission, click on Contact Us above.

 

After you have submitted your dissertation, the only corrections you may make are those required by the Neumann Library. Additional corrections requested by the student, the chair, or other committee member will not be accepted.

You can monitor the dissertation status by logging in to Vireo. The Neumann Library will contact you via your UHCL email address after review of the manuscript with any required corrections. Log-in to Vireo and you will notice that the Status of your work is "Needs Corrections." 

For step by step instructions about how to make corrections and resubmit your manuscript, please watch the video tutorial below. Click the Edit button and enter the View Application screen, where you can upload a corrected document. The screen will provide instructions, highlighted in red, for uploading a corrected document. You can replace the ETD using the upload tool on this screen and selecting “Complete Corrections” at the bottom of the screen when finished. You will be asked to confirm that you have completed the replacement and will then see a screen confirmation indicating that corrections have been successfully submitted.

All corrections must be made promptly and meet the deadlines at http://libguides.uhcl.edu/dissertation. Graduation will be postponed if corrections are not made on time.

Accessing Your Dissertation

Your work will be accessible directly from the UHCL Institutional Repository at https://uhcl-ir.tdl.org/uhcl-ir/, hosted by the Neumann Library and the Texas Digital Library (TDL). Researchers, practitioners, members of the public, and anyone interested in reading your work will be able to find it via the Neumann Library catalog, Google Scholar, Texas Digital Library, the National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, or other academic library catalogs based on searches for your name, the title, or the keywords from the abstract. Researchers will be able to cite it easily because it will be assigned a stable and permanent URL. The Institutional Repository will provide usage statistics, including how many people download it and the cities around the world from which people are viewing your work.

Printed and bound copies are not required by the University of Houston - Clear Lake, but you may want to have physical copies for yourself or others. You can print personal copies of your dissertation from the UHCL Copy Center. You can print/bind using an online service such as GradWorks Online or a local book binder here in Houston. These vendors are optional and provided here for informational purposes only. The University of Houston-Clear Lake does not endorse these vendors.

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