On March 26, 2013, the GSAS Office of Student Affairs hosted a two-hour “Nuts & Bolts” session for PhD candidates approaching graduation, detailing proper preparation and submission of the dissertation. The following is a summary of that workshop. For additional questions or advice, please contact the Student Affairs Office at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or 617-495-1814.

Thomas Dodson, program coordinator at the Office for Scholarly Communication, led the program with a “myth busting” presentation on Harvard’s commitment to open-access scholarship. Currently, dissertations accepted by GSAS are deposited in two online databases: ProQuest and DASH. Subscription-only and accessed mainly by scholars affiliated with university libraries, ProQuest does not make its contents visible to search engines like Google. As Harvard’s open-access depository, DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) is both publicly accessible and broadly searchable. Dodson explained that graduates may decline to deposit their dissertations in DASH, and that while all dissertations are submitted to ProQuest, authors may embargo access to them indefinitely or for specified periods of time.

Making reference to historical conceptions of the dissertation, Dodson went on to discourage graduates from adopting these measures. Since its European origins, Dodson noted, the PhD has been recognized as a contribution to public knowledge, disseminated by the most technologically efficacious means available. He urged graduates not to worry about the implications of open-access for publication, citing surveys indicating that the vast majority of publishers are willing to consider publicly available scholarly work for publication in journals and books. Students should speak to their advisors for guidance. Dodson also pointed to the benefits already being realized by initiatives like DASH, which currently receives around 3,000 downloads a day, mostly from locations outside the US. In places like Africa, he noted, where university libraries are extremely constrained in the number of academic journals to which they can subscribe, open access can be of tremendous use to scholars. Dodson then played a film in which professors Gary King and Stuart Shieber reinforced these points. As King put it, “The PhD is not a reward for secret knowledge.”

Jonathan Hulbert from the Office of the General Counsel then presented some advice on copyright considerations in the dissertation, explaining the concept of fair use as it applies to materials reproduced in scholarly writing, and suggesting some ways graduates might go about seeking permissions in more ambiguous cases.

Finally, Maggie Welsh and Kathy Hanley from the Registrar’s office spoke about the proper formatting of the dissertation, which is necessary for it to be accepted and for students to graduate. They noted that improper formatting leads to dozens of rejected dissertations every year, and they advised students to carefully follow the guidelines explained in Form of the PhD Dissertation. Also available for PDF download is a list of the ten most common formatting errors for the PhD, including missing acceptance certificates, improper pagination, and mislabeled figures and tables. They also stressed that the dissertation is a final draft: once submitted to and approved by the Registrar, it cannot be modified in any way.