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RE: open access to dissertations



Then i challenge you to read my article and tell me how "highly specialized" are the revised dissertations I name there, some of which have sold in numbers that would please any commercial publisher. I am astonished that there is such a knee-jerk prejudice against revised dissertations. And it's not as though the revisions alone made these books into something other than "highly specialized" works. Susan Okin's dissertation was on "Women in Western Political Thought" to begin with. Narrow? Hardly! Some of these turn out to be the most important books these scholars ever wrote. And some helped create entire new avenues of research, as Peter Evans's book on "Dependent Development" did in helping dependency theory become the paradigm in social science research on Latin America for a decade or more. It saddens me to think that revised dissertations are discriminated against because of such blithe assumptions.

Sandy Thatcher


At 5:04 PM -0400 4/13/11, Elizabeth E. Kirk wrote:

Kevin is completely on target. Dissertations are by nature highly specialized, and in areas of intense study (say, James Joyce) where little turf has been left unclaimed, they can be downright...odd in their focus. Also, they represent the work of scholars who are not yet established in their fields. If you're going to pay $130 for a monograph, it is likely that you will choose the one written by the star, not the work that not even the author hopes is his/her magnum opus. It is the simple but cruel reality of many choices and too few dollars.

Elizabeth E. Kirk
Associate Librarian for Information Resources
Dartmouth College Library
Hanover, NH, USA
elizabeth.e.kirk@dartmouth.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Kevin Smith
Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2011 10:15 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: open access to dissertations

Sandy's research confirms what librarians are usually perfectly
ready to admit, that they often must exclude revised
dissertations from approval plans. The problem with the
Chronicle article, however, is that it correctly notes the effect
but selects the wrong cause. I doubt any librarian excludes
dissertations because of open access ETD repositories or even
because of ProQuest availability. Being based on a dissertation
is simply a surrogate, in approval plan profiles, for weeding out
books likely to have a very high cost and a limited audience. As
monograph budgets shrink, libraries simply cannot afford to buy
books that will have only very specialized readerships and will
sometimes cost over $100 per title. If such purchases are to be
made at all, they have to be made in response to an expressed
need, not included in a blanket approval plan where very limited
returns are permitted. And from this perspective, information
about the scope of revisions, will it would be helpful, is
probably not determinative.

Kevin L. Smith, M.L.S., J.D.
Director of Scholarly Communications
Duke University, Perkins Library
P.O. Box 90193
919-668-4451
kevin.l.smith@duke.edu