The Road From Dissertation to Book Has a New Pothole: the Internet - Research - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Ann R. Hawkins, a professor of English at Texas Tech University, likes the idea of sharing research, but she's worried that sharing has gone too far when it comes to students' dissertations. Not long ago, Ms. Hawkins heard from a junior scholar who wanted her to consider his revised dissertation for a series she edits for Pickering & Chatto, an academic press. She liked the idea—until she discovered his work was fully accessible on the Internet. Few would buy the specialized book, she worried, if much of its contents was already freely available....But more institutions now require master's and Ph.D. candidates to submit work in electronic form, and it appears that the rules could make publishing—and job-hunting—even harder, at least in some cases. The digital push is being driven by an understandable desire to make scholarship, some of it supported by public money, easily available. And bits and bytes don't take up shelf space in cramped libraries the way bound dissertations do. But several series editors and publishers echo Hawkins's concerns....Others, though, take the opposite view: Digital dissertations stand a better chance of getting published because, if a work is viewed or downloaded many times, that can signal there's a readership for it. It's an issue "with more angles than a geometry textbook," says Patrick Alexander, director of Penn State University Press, in an e-mail....Other scholarly publishers, however, see no need to worry. Jim McCoy, who directs the University of Iowa Press, which publishes a mix of fiction and nonfiction books, views open access as an opportunity. "Any dissertation that's on the Internet and has taken on a life of its own, that would be a selling point to me," Mr. McCoy says. "That would mean there's a market out there for this material, and there could be an even greater market" for a revised, edited, well-marketed version published by a scholarly press...."