Historians Seek a Delay in Posting Dissertations - NYTimes.com

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-07-29

Summary:

"FIRST came years of being a foot messenger in New York City and working in data entry. Then, frustrated with his life, and feeling the responsibility of providing for a child, Michael D. Hattem entered the Borough of Manhattan Community College — the only college that would admit him, he says, as a high school dropout with a G.E.D. He succeeded at community college, and, in 2011, graduated from City College.  Today, Mr. Hattem, 38, is a graduate student at Yale working on a dissertation in American history that 'explores the role of competing historical memories of 17th-century Britain in shaping late colonial political culture.'

He told his exceptional story to help explain why he came to the defense of the American Historical Association last week when it issued a statement calling on universities to allow newly minted Ph.D’s to 'embargo' their dissertations for up to six years — that is, keep them from being circulated online.  Though policies vary from university to university, the practice increasingly is to require that dissertations be filed electronically upon acceptance and to provide them to anyone with access to a university’s online collection.  The statement, which appeared to come out of the blue, caused more than a few double-takes. Don’t historians want their research to be immediately shared, stimulating arguments and, ideally, new research that either refutes or reinforces those arguments? And why would someone work years to produce a dissertation and then insist that it not be seen for as many as six more years? Academics almost by definition are delayed-gratification specialists, but still.  'Ideally, I would want all of our work freely available,' Mr. Hattem said in a telephone interview, 'but we have to deal with the way things are.'  And the way things are, he said, is that university presses are known to be skeptical about agreeing to publish a book when the Ph.D dissertation it is based on is readily available online.  'If you want tenure at a university, you have to publish a book,' he said. 'It’s professional currency' ... 'The idea of locking up ideas for six years is not right,' said Heather Joseph, the executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, which favors open research. 'The thing that bothered us the most is that it was a one-dimensional response to a multidimensional issue, and a missed opportunity.'  a lot of fogginess remains in the arguments from all sides, beginning with the central question: Do university presses really care if a dissertation is available when they are publishing a thoroughly revised work years later?  A recent survey of university presses found a sliding scale of concern among executives who were asked about publishing work derived from a dissertation that was 'openly available.' Depending on how the findings are interpreted, they could be worrisome — only 10 percent responded “always welcome” — or reassuring in that a large majority said they were open to giving such work a chance to impress.  Peter M. Berkery Jr., the executive director of the Association of American University Presses, said he spent a day quickly learning about the issue, which had not been on his radar, and came away confused by the stir.  He said he spoke to 15 heads of university presses, and 'I haven’t found one person who has said if it is available open access, we won’t publish it.' Citing his own experience at Oxford University Press, he said that a book was necessarily an entirely different work from the dissertation that laid its groundwork, and is judged on its own terms ..."

Link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/business/media/historians-seek-a-delay-in-posting-dissertations.html?_r=2&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&partner=rss&

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.universities oa.societies oa.surveys oa.impact oa.students oa.prestige oa.sparc oa.embargoes oa.etds oa.history oa.colleges oa.aha oa.up oa.hei oa.humanities oa.ssh

Date tagged:

07/29/2013, 18:45

Date published:

07/29/2013, 14:45