Touro Scholar

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Touro Scholar is the perfect venue for archiving and showcasing your department or program's theses, dissertations, and capstones. There are options to view these works within the Touro community only or to have it publicly accessible. With permission from a faculty advisor, authors can also choose to delay the full-text availability of their work for a specific time of their choosing.

Please contact us if you have any questions. 

Depositing Your Thesis or Dissertation

1. Go to the NYMC section of Touro Scholar. 
2. Click on Deposit Work.
3. Under New York Medical College (NYMC), choose status (Student) and the type of work you plan to submit (NYMC Student Theses).
4. Login. Create an account if you do not have one.
5. You will be directed to a Deposit Agreement page. Read it carefully and check the box if you want to continue.
6. Fill out the form. 
7. Under Additional Files, you must upload a signed PDF of the Thesis/Dissertation Permission Form. This form must be signed by you and your advisor.

8. After clicking on Submit, a preview screen will appear. Read through all of the information carefully, checking for errors and correct formatting. You should receive an email confirming your submission. This email will also give you a link to check the status of your submission.  

   Note: Your work is not publicly available until an administrator has approved it. You will receive an email when your work is live.

Author Rights and Responsibilities 

Depositing your work to Touro Scholar is not a transfer of copyright. The author retains all ownership rights to the copyright of the work.

The author(s) also retains the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of the work. 

In the United States today, copyright protection automatically covers all new copyrightable works, including your thesis/dissertation. Copyright law no longer requires that authors register the work with the US Copyright Office or place a copyright notice on the work merely to obtain copyright protection.

However, registering a work comes with legal benefits. For more information about your copyright protections, or how to formally register a work, see Copyright Basics from the US Copyright Office. 

Note that before depositing your thesis/dissertation in Touro Scholar, you must review and sign the Thesis/Dissertation Permission form. 

This form requires you, the author and copyright holder, to certify that you have obtained all necessary written permission(s) from the owner(s) of copyrighted matter included in your thesis or dissertation (such as the display of images, tables, or figures). 

For more information about copyright infringement and its consequences, see Copyright Infringement & Remedies, and Plagiarism vs. Copyright Infringement. 

Obtaining Permissions

Have you displayed images, tables, figures, long blocks of text, or other work not created by you?

If so, you need to obtain written permission from the copyright holder(s) and/or rights holder when uploading your work to Touro Scholar. This involves first verifying the copyright status and contacting the copyright holder(s) and/or rights holder of any unoriginal work that is displayed in your thesis/dissertation. 

In some cases, even reusing your own published articles can raise copyright concerns if you have transferred your copyright to someone else, like your publisher. Similarly, even when copyright permits your use of a work, contract law may prevent it. When you agree to terms of use in order to gain access to a copy of a work (such as a letter in an archive or a newspaper article in an online database), those terms also control what you can do with the work. 

In addition to the copyright issues, it is also vital to properly attribute (cite) the work. 

You can proceed without copyright permission if you are using something that is not copyrightable, or is in the public domain.

Please contact a librarian and/or consult with your advisor for questions about the use of copyrighted materials.

Future Patents or Publication Derived from Deposited Work

By signing the Thesis/Dissertation Permission Form, the author grants New York Medical College the non-exclusive right to archive online and make the thesis/dissertation accessible in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. 

Although the author retains the right publish, distribute and use the work elsewhere, some journals may have restrictions regarding work previously published online. Exceptions often exist for theses/dissertations, but you will want to check with your publisher. This is particularly true for patent applications.

If you do have plans to publish all or parts of your work in a scholarly journal, or apply for a patent, you will want to discuss embargoing the work with your advisor.

The Option to Embargo

When submitting to Touro Scholar, you have the option to embargo your thesis/dissertation (i.e. restrict or delay publication for a period of time).

Embargo in Touro Scholar requires the approval of your faculty advisor and may not exceed 5 years. 

Most theses and dissertations are not embargoed, and your advisor may require detailed justification for embargoing your work, or may not approve of embargo. 

Common justifications for embargo are: 

• The author plans to apply for a patent using data or descriptions contained in the work. 
• The author has specific intentions to publish all or part of the work elsewhere. 
• The author has previously published the work in whole or in part with restrictions on future publication.
• The work includes data covered by a nondisclosure agreement for a specified period of time, including personal information, company secrets, or intellectual property.

In the case that embargo has been approved by the faculty advisor, the option for embargo MUST be selected both during the upload process in Touro Scholar (by selecting the optional Embargo field during submission), AND indicated on the signed Thesis/Dissertation permission form.

Changes to Submissions

The uploaded document submitted to Touro Scholar MUST be the final version. The library may not change a publication, as it is an archival citable document that demands stability.

Please contact the Phillip Capozzi, M.D. Library  if you have questions or concerns regarding the descriptive elements of your uploaded document. 

This guide has been adapted from BePress, Georgia Southern University Libraries, University of Michigan Library and Texas State University Libraries (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).