RE: open access to dissertations

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

This is very helpful, thanks. My information originally came from 
Helmut Schwarzer at YBP:

At 5:45 PM -0400 3/22/07, Helmut Schwarzer wrote:
>Here's the updated word on this issue. Important to distinguish
>between revised and UNrevised dissertations.
>
>1. Unrevised: is the kiss of death for sales. Sales would be 20-30%
>at most of what they'd normally be.
>2. Revised: not all THAT bad, 75-80% of normal sales.

His figures for revised dissertations correspond very closely to 
what i discovered when i compared sales of Penn State's books in 
Latin American studies, viz., about a 20-25% lower sale for books 
originating as dissertations.  Helmut may have considered this 
"not all THAT bad," but I assure you that this is a big enough 
difference to make acquiring editors wonder whether they should 
be considering books based on dissertations.

As for revised dissertations being obviously "highly 
specialized," let me challenge you--or anyone else on this 
list--to look over the single-authored books in Latin American 
studies published at Penn State and, without cheating and looking 
at the author's academic level, tell me which ones were based on 
dissertations and which not: 
http://www.psupress.org/books/book_subject_lastud.html.

Sandy Thatcher


At 4:58 PM -0400 4/15/11, Michael Zeoli wrote:

>Just a note of clarification to Sandy's point about dissertations
>on approval plans.  Approval Plan vendors put dissertations into
>2 groups: Unrevised Dissertations and Revised Dissertations.  It
>is true that most academic libraries exclude Unrevised
>Dissertations (with some notable exceptions such as those
>published by the Univ. of the West Indies Press).  In my
>experience (15 years writing these plans), few exclude Revised
>Disserations.  And as Rick points out, there is also an
>intermediate step: Send slips (in lieu of books).  Here's how
>that portion of a profile typically appears in libraries with
>approval plans (B-allow books, S-limit to slips, X-exclude):

[SNIP]