Why Put at Risk Publishing Options of Our Most Vulnerable Colleagues?

Use the link to access the full text essay posted to the blog AHA Today.  "I must confess to feeling disheartened that so many members of the history community have attacked what seems to me the mild-mannered and entirely reasonable statement that the American Historical Association’s Professional Division crafted on behalf of early-career historians worried about the potential impact that institutionally mandated digital posting of their dissertations might have on their eventual ability to publish those dissertations in book form ... As a practicing historian who has worked closely with a fair number of publishers for more than three decades, I can testify that concerns about online dissertations competing with books are very real. Indeed, I’ve had at least one former graduate student whose publisher refused to permit publication of an article in one of our discipline’s most prestigious journals for fear that it might undermine sales of his soon-to-be-published book. Since the publisher threatened to cancel the book contract if the article appeared, I can only imagine what it would have done had the entire dissertation been available online. In another instance, I had to intervene with a government agency to request the removal of an online version of one of my students’ dissertations that had been posted without the student’s permission and that the publisher said would likely jeopardize the book contract if it remained available for free download. I’ve had several editors from distinguished presses tell me (off the record, unsurprisingly) that although they would certainly consider publishing a revised version of a dissertation that had been posted online, the general effect of online posting would be to raise the bar for whether they would look at such a dissertation in the first place or eventually offer it a contract. And I’ve heard of university libraries that now save money by choosing systematically not to purchase university press books based on dissertations that are available online.  This is mere anecdotal evidence, I know, but since I experienced these anecdotes at first hand and have myself had to mentor students trying to navigate these scary circumstances, I’m troubled by those who seem blithely to assume that such situations are so inconceivably unlikely that we shouldn’t give them a second thought ...  It’s certainly true that book publishing is being transformed by the digital revolution, and equally true that all historians need to be working to promote alternative ways of communicating the insights of our scholarship beyond the covers of book-length monographs. I hope anyone who studies my website or CV, or who reads the AHA presidential columns I wrote last year on “the public practice of history in and for a digital age” will recognize how committed I am to supporting and participating as fully as I can in this digital transition: http://www.williamcronon.net/aha-writings.htm.  But are enthusiasts for open access really so passionate about their cause that they would force on their most junior and vulnerable colleagues the premature release of work that has taken the better part of a decade to produce even 1) if those colleagues do not yet feel their work is ready for publication; or 2) if they object to giving away for free years of scholarly labor; or 3) if they fear running the risk of other more established scholars possibly scooping their findings before they themselves can get them fully into print; or 4) if there’s even a modest chance that an online dissertation might undermine their ability to attract the best possible publisher for a revised version of that work in book form?  In the fierce tweets and blog posts that have been swirling around the AHA statement over the past week, much has been made of an article by Marisa L. Ramirez, Joan T. Dalton, Gail McMillan, Max Read, and Nancy H. Seamans entitled 'Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities? Findings from a 2011 Survey of Academic Publishers' published this month in the journal College & Research Libraries. Open-access enthusiasts note that in the 2011 survey reported by this article, only 7.3% of university press directors surveyed would under no circumstances consider printing a book that was already available as an open-access electronic dissertation—implying that only a handful of antediluvian presses are worried about this problem or would stand in the way of recent PhDs publishing their online dissertations in book form.  But if you look at the survey’s results from a different angle, it’s easy to draw much more worrisome conclusions from the data. First, an additional 7.3% said they would consider publication only if the digital version of the dissertation were accessible solely on the campus where the PhD originated. So nearly one-sixth of all university presses would refuse to publish open-access digit