University Archiving vs Press Publication

"In recent years, partly as a response to rising costs, Canadian universities shifted from depositing doctoral dissertations (and master’s theses) in paper on library shelves to digital archiving in online university repositories (in the US, where this is also widespread, these are commonly abbreviated ETD: Electronic Theses and Dissertations). These archives are open access, so there are no barriers to anyone anywhere in the world finding and reading the full documents ... Many of us hear about this through anecdote: a Canadian university press that inserted a clause in a book contract requiring that the dissertation on which the book was based not appear online for seven years; a US university press that directed all of its acquisition editors not to consider Canadian dissertation-based projects because they are all online already; a UK university press that asks in its proposal form if all or part of the book project is available open access. These stories are not so persistent as to suggest a widespread crisis, but they do persist. Scholarship is emerging that supports this anecdotal view (see Ramirez et al.). University presses and other academic publishers across the West do not yet have a coordinated response to ETDs, but it is clear that there are concerns about recouping the costs of publication if a similar work is freely available online and readily discoverable—and, as one university press editor remarked in a public panel discussion about Open Access at Dalhousie, there is little scholarly value in putting scarce press resources towards print publication for material that is already in the public domain ..."