Submission Portal

Filing for copyright registration with a government office (such as the U.S. Copyright Office) is not required to establish your copyright ownership: in many countries, including the United States and others that adhere to the Berne Convention, intellectual works such as disquisitions are automatically protected by copyright as soon as they are created and fixed in a tangible form. Thus, your work will be copyrighted as soon as it's published.

However, you might want to file for copyright if you want to create a public record of your ownership (this record can be valuable if you ever need to prove your ownership in a legal dispute), file a lawsuit for copyright infringement (having a registered copyright could make it easier to pursue legal action and potentially receive statutory damages and attorney's fees), or provide international protection (registration may be necessary for additional protections in certain jurisdictions or under international treaties).

Note that if you are including previously published materials in your disquisition, it's likely that you have already transferred copyright ownership to the publisher for those materials, and may not be able to file for copyright ownership on your own behalf. For more information on the legalities of copyright and your rights as author, please visit the NDSU Library Copyright Center or contact the NDSU RCA tech transfer office.

Hardbound copies of your final document are not required by the Graduate School, but your department may require them. Contact your department's graduate coordinator for more information.

When you submit your disquisition on ProQuest, the Graduate School is automatically notified of your submission. Similarly, a master's paper submitted via email is sent directly to the Disquisition Coordinator. Depending on the volume of submissions, you will receive a confirmation email within a day or two from the Disquisition Coordinator letting you know we've received your disquisition and are in the process of checking that you've completed your submission requirements.

If you have not received an email from the Disquisition Coordinator confirming your submission within two business days, please send an email to the Disquisition Coordinator and/or your Academic Support Specialist.

Revised theses and dissertations are submitted in your ETD on ProQuest as revisions to your original document; master's papers will send their revisions via email to the Dissertation Coordinator.

If you need help submitting your revisions, step-by-step instructions are available in the "Review Procedures" document linked near the top of this page; look for them on the last page of the PDF. Revised documents that have been submitted as a new ETD on ProQuest will not be reviewed until they are uploaded to your original ETD.

Yes. The majority of journals will accept manuscripts based on content from your disquisition even if it's published. If you want to publish in a journal that requires unpublished work or if you already have a publication pending, you can request a delayed release of your disquisition after you've submitted your ETD on ProQuest.