Disembargo: An Open Access Dissertation, One Letter at a Time - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"October 21-27 is Open Access Week, in which libraries, colleges, and research institutions across the globe stress the value of free and immediate access to the results of scholarly research. Open access is a complex issue, though, as Adeline made clear when she released her dissertation under a Creative Commons license in July. An open access advocate myself, I’ve long wanted to articulate clearly why I want my own scholarship to be public and freely accessible (and almost all of it is). The American Historical Association’s suggestion this summer that graduate students embargo their dissertations for up to six years was almost—almost—my impetus to make such a formal declaration. But there were already many other scholars writing many other things about the AHA, dissertations, embargoes, and open access. So instead of writing something, I made something: Disembargo. Disembargo is an open access dissertation (my own), emerging from a self-imposed six-year embargo, one letter at a time. Every ten minutes Disembargo releases a single character—a letter, number, or space—from my final dissertation manuscript. This character is published under a Creative Commons license, and it joins the previously released characters of my dissertation. The header image above is what Disembargo looked like thirty minutes after it launched on September 3, 2013. It took roughly twelve hours for the full title (Radicalizing Consumption in the Fiction of Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison) to emerge ..."