Since March 15, 2020, theses have been submitted electronically in accordance with the Institute’s Emergency Academic Regulations.
The thesis specifications do not reflect the transition to electronic submission. Some portions do still reference physical printing and submission of your thesis. You may disregard these references.
Please pay close attention to the following sections of the Specifications for Thesis Preparation:
Here are some sample title and abstract pages to assist you with formatting:
Submit the following:
If possible, students should save their thesis as a PDF/A-1
File naming
Files must be named according to this scheme: authorLastName-kerberos ID-degree-dept-year-type_other.ext
Examples:
The Office of Graduate Education oversees the policies and procedures for requesting a temporary publication hold of your thesis.
Note: Request for temporary holds must be submitted prior to graduation.
This form must be completed by the day of graduation: https://thesis-submit.mit.edu/.
The information you provide must match the title page and abstract of your thesis. You will be asked to confirm or provide:
If you retain copyright you may also, optionally, apply a Creative Commons License to your thesis. The Creative Commons License allows you to grant permissions and provide guidance on how your work can be reused by others. For more information about CC: https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/
Before you apply a CC license or CC0 (public domain) to your work, please note that the licenses cannot be revoked. This means once you apply a CC license to your material, anyone who receives it may rely on that license for as long as the material is protected by copyright, even if you later stop distributing it.
Formatting Your Copyright Statement
What Copyright information to submit to the Libraries
Here is an example of a title page with one of the CC licenses:
What is ORCID?
ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-based effort to provide a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a method of linking research-related items, such as articles as datasets, to these identifiers.
ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher. The goal is to support the creation of a permanent, clear, and unambiguous record of scholarly communication by enabling reliable attribution of authors and contributors.
This process also associates your ORCID with your MIT profile. Once you have the ID you also have the option to build your profile through the “import works” button, associating your papers, data sets, and other research output with your ID. You can then include the ID as a link on your CV or web page. You can also create an account without linking it to your MIT profile here.
See our ORCID FAQ for more information.
Have questions?
Contact us at mit-theses@mit.edu.