Re: open access to dissertations

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

There are at least two separate issues here. One is that some 
librarians are reluctant to purchase books based on 
dissertations. The other is that making dissertations available 
in OA form may make it harder to find a traditional publisher for 
the works.  These two issues undoubtedly overlap.

A third issue, not raised in the excellent Chronicle piece, is 
that there is an economy of dissertations at some institutions. 
I am familiar with one instance (I have no idea how widespread 
this practice is) where doctoral students are required to post 
their dissertations to an institutional repository.  There is a 
fee charged for this service, which the head of the IR told me 
generates a surplus.  The material is offered on an OA basis. 
Note the elements of this:  a mandate, a profit to the IR, and 
OA, with the OA aspect potentially interfering with formal 
publication.

Joe Esposito

On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 4:44 PM, Sandy Thatcher
<sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu> wrote:
> 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
>>