RE: open access to dissertations

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

This is all very illuminating, Mike, and I greatly appreciate 
your sharing this information.

I had not known before about the differential between commercial 
and university press sales figures on revised dissertations. This 
is very encouraging indeed, as it suggests that librarians do 
recognize and value the peer-review procedures that university 
presses are mandated (by AAUP membership by-laws) to follow. 
(Commercial academic publishers may or may not follow such 
procedures as rigorously, or at all; I know that Lynne Rienner, 
for whom I work part-time now, does follow procedures that are 
just as rigorous.  But because there is no prescribed procedure 
that commercial academic publishers must follow, no librarian can 
ever be sure whether they do or not.)

I am naturally very pleased at the results for Penn State Press. 
Art history, as you know, has been under severe challenge for 
many years, and some of the once leading publishers in this field 
have abandoned it because of the high costs of publishing in it 
and the special problems (like image permissions and the need for 
very high-quality production) that it involves. At Penn State we 
persevered despite these obstacles, and it is gratifying that 
libraries are supporting the Press in this way. Before I left, I 
succeeded in winning an NEH Challenge Grant to support publishing 
in this and a number of other humanities fields, and I also 
helped instigate the cooperative project in art history 
publishing that the Mellon Foundation has now funded with Penn 
State partnering with the presses at Duke, Penn, and Washington. 
So there is still some hope for this field yet.

The figures for the Latin American titles are gratifying, too, 
though I note that there is still a 10% difference between sales 
of regular books and sales of revised dissertations. So the 
problem still persists, even if it is at a less dire level than I 
had earlier believed, based on Helmut's aggregated numbers.

This difference may still tempt acquiring editors to avoid 
revised dissertations, since times are so tight now that even 
small differences in sales are important. I see two possible ways 
of ameliorating the problem:

1) Make it harder for YPB and other vendors to tell what is a 
revised dissertation or not.

2) Provide more information about what the "value added" to the
dissertation has been in the process of revision.

In other words, offer less transparency or more.

The first strategy would require publishers at a minimum to take 
steps: a) to make sure every author does not include information 
in Acknowledgments that would reveal the book's origin as a 
dissertation; b) to change the title so that it cannot readily be 
matched with the dissertation's title; c) to refer to the author, 
not as an assistant professor, but just as a teacher at X 
university.

The second strategy would require publishers to include in the 
front matter, perhaps as part of a Preface or even as a 
separately labeled section, a detailed explanation of what the 
author did to turn the dissertation into a book. This would 
provide vendors and librarians with much more information on 
which they could base their own recommendations about purchasing 
each book or, with the PDA model, patrons who could better tell 
if they needed the book rather than just relying on what the 
dissertation contained.

I would welcome your comments about the utility of these 
strategies--and the comments of librarians on this list. I prefer 
greater transparency myself, but if the price of rescuing revised 
dissertations from the bias in the system that now threatens 
their viability as contributions to scholarly communication is 
less transparency, I would not hesitate to adopt that strategy to 
make YBP's job of categorizing books more difficult.  In line 
with Kevin's observation, the path of least resistance (and cost) 
will be followed, other things being equal, so raising YBP's cost 
of categorizing may be the simplest way to solve the problem!

Sandy Thatcher



At 11:13 PM -0400 4/19/11, Michael Zeoli wrote:
>Sandy,
>
>Helmut Schwarzer is a rare wit - at lunch last week he asked if I
>ever had contact with you or his "dear friend" Patrick Alexander.
>His numbers are reliable, of course (few would dare contest
>Helmut's knowledge of publishing), when considering dissertations
>from all publishers.  As my numbers showed, UP *Revised*
>dissertations sold an average of 85 copies while the Trade Press
>dissertations sold fewer than half that number.  As a percentage,
>UP's fared much better after jettisoning the ballast of the Trade
>ones (Trade Revised Dissertations sell less than 50% the number
>of their titles generally).
>
>As to your challenge, I did look (but must admit I cheated ;-)).
>Library collecting of Penn State University Press is excellent
>(higher than the average UP sales by almost 20% on a per title
>basis) - a credit to you and your colleagues.  Last year YBP
>profiled 77 new PSU titles. 58% of YBP sales of PSU titles were
>via 'auto-ship' approval.
>
>There were 17 Revised Dissertations (no Unrevised Dissertations).
>52% sold on auto-ship approval.  There were 17 titles with a
>Latin American focus.  62% were acquired by libraries as
>'auto-ship approvals, and the 3 Revised dissertations in the
>group sold 52% on auto-ship approval.
>
>The worst PSU sellers were a reprint, a journal monograph, a
>periodical anthology, personal narratives ('autobiographies' by
>people such as me), and titles focused on individual U.S. states
>(there were 8 of these and one was a reprint, a double whammy).
>
>The best-sellers were brilliant, particularly in the fine arts -
>one winning the ALAA 2011 Art Book Award and a notable percentage
>on YBP Core Title lists.  As for your challenge about the
>"narrowness" of the Latin American titles, library acquisition of
>them proves you are right - and the librarians know it!  [If
>you'd like the spreadsheet with this information, Sandy, just let
>me know where to send it.]
>
>Mike
>
>**************************************
>Michael Zeoli
>Director, Global Consortia
>YBP Library Services
>mzeoli@ybp.com