RE: open access to dissertations

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

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