RE: open access to dissertations

[Jennifer Howard <Jennifer.Howard@chronicle.com>]

Hi all,

Weighing in late here, though I've been following this 
conversation with interest. (I wrote the Chronicle article in 
question.) I wanted to respond to Kevin's point about having 
picked the wrong cause; my focus in the article was not on causes 
but on fears some publishers and authors have about ETDs. 
Whatever the causes, the fears are genuine. Whether they're 
justified is another question.

Cheers,

Jen


-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Smith [mailto:kevin.l.smith@duke.edu]
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


On Apr 11, 2011, at 8:28 PM, "Sandy Thatcher"
<sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu> wrote:
> For those of you who cannot access the full article, I'll reprint my
> comment on it here:
>
> I addressed this question in "Dissertations into Books? The Lack of
> Logic in the System" (Against the Grain, April 2007), which can be
> found at Penn State Press's web site here:
>
> http://www.psupress.org/news/S