RE: open access to dissertations

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

My argument is that automatically excluding revised dissertations 
from consideration without even examining them has potentially 
very serious consequences for the future of scholarship, as the 
best junior scholars will be unable to get tenure if they can't 
publish their first book as a revised dissertation (unless the 
P&T system is drastically overhauled). If, as Rick says, PDA can 
come to the rescue here and pick up some of these books later 
down the line, that's a partial remedy, and perhaps the best that 
can be expected under the circumstances of limited resources. But 
I'm just imaging what the world of scholarship would look like 
today if many of these earlier revised dissertations had failed 
to get published because the practices now in place had prevented 
publishers from even considering them.

Sandy Thatcher

P.S. I can, of course, cite more recent examples, but the more 
recent the example, the less likely the book is to have had time 
to achieve classic status. I'm also wondering what would have 
happened to Condi Rice's subsequent career if she had been unable 
to publish her revised dissertation at Princeton with me in 1984. 
Would she have gone on to get tenure at Stanford and eventually 
become provost? Would she have have had the credentials as a 
Soviet military expert that got her the first job she had in 
government service on the National Security Council, paving the 
way for her to become Secretary of State later on?


At 5:45 PM -0400 4/14/11, Kevin Smith wrote:

>Really, Sandy, your choice of examples is indicative of where the
>problem lies.  Both of these works were published over thirty
>years ago.  Times have changed dramatically since then.  Library
>purchasing power is a fraction of what it was when these books
>were issued.  It is easy to dispute any particular decision when
>one is not in the position of having to make that decision, but
>librarians must decide the best way to spend those very limited
>dollars.  For each revised dissertation that is bought, some
>other deserving book is not purchased, and the decisions are made
>in that balance, not in isolation.
>
>I do not know if librarians would buy some modern day equivalent
>of these examples; to know that we would have to also know what
>they would not be able to purchase as a consequence.  What I
>suggested, and what I believe to be accurate, is that librarians
>often have to exclude revised dissertations from approval plans
>precisely because they so often involve this difficult decision
>about relative value.  It is not ignorance or willfulness, it is
>simply the necessity of dealing responsibly with the money we are
>given in a market where we can purchase but a fraction of what we
>would like to buy.
>
>I do not understand why the message that we do not have unlimited
>money, so that we can simply evaluate each book on its own merits
>and buy all that are worthwhile, is so hard to communicate.  I
>suppose one reason is that recognizing that fact would involve
>acknowledging that it is the pricing policies of publishers,
>albeit a different group of publishers from those who usually
>publish revised dissertations, that are partly responsible for
>the situation.
>
>Kevin L. Smith, M.L.S., J.D.
>Scholarly Communications Officer
>Duke University
>kevin.l.smith@duke.edu<mailto:kevin.l.smith@duke.edu>