Re: open access to dissertations

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

For those of you who cannot access the full article, I'll reprint 
my comment on it here:

I addressed this question in "Dissertations into Books? The Lack of
Logic in the System" (Against the Grain, April 2007), which can be
found at Penn State Press's web site here:

http://www.psupress.org/news/S

There, pace "mbelvadi," I provided the evidence of librarians 
refusing to purchase books based on dissertations. They do so 
simply by instructing vendors like Yankee Book Peddler to look 
for evidence (in the book's Acknowledgments, e.g., or in 
ProQuest's database by author/title) that the book originated as 
a dissertation and they then exclude such books from inclusion in 
their approval plans. Estimates of the effects on sales vary, 
with reductions ranging from 20% to 40%.

I examined the titles in Latin American studies published by Penn 
State Press, when I was director there (1989-2009), and found a 
difference in average sale between books based on dissertations 
and those not so based at the lower end of this range. So there 
is a demonstrable effect. The problem was even worse, no doubt, 
when ProQuest had an agreement with Amazon to sell dissertations; 
I understand that this will begin again soon.

It is because of this effect that we initiated the practice at 
Penn State of asking every author of a revised dissertation to 
explain in detail the differences between dissertation and book. 
While those differences are often very substantial indeed, 
unfortunately librarians who control approval plans do not have 
access to this information and therefore do not act upon it; it 
suffices for them that the author did write a dissertation on the 
subject to exclude it from the approval plan. Knowing of this 
practice by librarians, which is "rational" from their point of 
view, editors for publishers "rationally" decide not to consider 
books based on dissertations for publication.

Yet tenure committees continue, "rationally" from their 
standpoint, to require a book or two for award of tenure. Such 
subsystem-level rationality adds up to systemic dysfunctionality, 
which can only be repaired by intervention from top 
administrators, which sadly has not been forthcoming. As the date 
on my article indicates, this is not a new problem; the origins 
of it go back at least a decade.

Sandy Thatcher


>Today's Chronicle of Higher Education reports the reluctance of
>presses to publish in book form dissertations that have been made
>openly available on the Internet.  ("Openly":  there's a hitch there,
>in that access to ProQuest dissertation information is
>subscription-only, but once inside that subscription, which most
>universities have, the individual item may be 100% freely available or
>embargoed in various degrees, at the author's choice.)  The young
>scholar in many fields has two urges:  to make his/her work widely
>known and to acquire the cultural capital of formal publication.  This
>article suggests an implicit negotiation in progress over the costs
>and benefits of fulfilling those urges.
>
>Jim O'Donnell
>Georgetown
>
>The article is at (by subscription):
>
>http://chronicle.com/article/The-Road-From-Dissertation-to/126977/
>
>Snippet:
>
>Ann R. Hawkins, a professor of English at Texas Tech University,
>likes the idea of sharing research, but she's worried that
>sharing has gone too far when it comes to students'
>dissertations.
>
>Not long ago, Ms. Hawkins heard from a junior scholar who wanted 
>her to consider his revised dissertation for a series she edits 
>for Pickering & Chatto, an academic press. She liked the idea - 
>until she discovered his work was fully accessible on the 
>Internet. Few would buy the specialized book, she worried, if 
>much of its contents was already freely available.