American ETD dissemination in the age of open access

"A stark incongruity in the treatment of academic scholarship persists on many U.S. campuses today. Faculty authors are generally free to publish in whatever vehicle suits their needs and goals, while also expected (or mandated) to deposit their works in the open access university repository. By contrast, graduate students typically must send their scholarship to a single commercial publisher for toll-access, while also required to submit their works to the university repository.1,2,3 For faculty, values of academic freedom, author rights, and disciplinary best practices govern their publishing choices. For graduate students, compliance with ProQuest submission mandates is necessary to graduate. Exploring the reasons for treating our newest scholars so differently from their faculty advisors is beyond the scope of this column. Instead, the focus here is on those institutions that have recognized the importance of student publishing choice as a pedagogical and ethical value. This article highlights examples where graduation requirements have changed to better serve all authors on campus, while also benefitting readers who find value in students’ unique works of scholarship. The author’s sole aim is to spur discussion on U.S. campuses about electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) submission and dissemination practices in order to advance graduate education and to improve worldwide access to graduate research. ProQuest mandates for ETDs no doubt come from well-intended university administrators. But student reactions to these policies appear to be mixed. Some want to market their works through an established dissertation reseller, attracted by the prospect of revenue from sales. This view was recently reflected by Ed.D. recipient Will Deyamport, tweeting his appreciation for possible royalties earned.4 Other recent graduates tweet their pleasure at seeing their works 'published,'5 evidently accepting ProQuest’s claim that assigning an ISBN to the ETD equals publication. 6 Yet other students strongly oppose university policies mandating ProQuest submission, seeing a glaring contradiction to the values of the open access movement, where scholarly literature is expected to be 'online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.'7 At Texas A&M, for example, a doctoral student requested a policy change as a 'conscientious objector,' spurring discussions about graduate requirements across the university ... In light of student objections, some universities are reconsidering ETD policies to allow for student choice. For example, the new ETD program at Johns Hopkins University requires submission to the university repository but leaves ProQuest optional ... The Georgia Institute of Technology switched to a ProQuest-optional policy in Fall 2012 after receiving complaints about the ProQuest agreement students were required to sign. As reported by Fred Rascoe, writing in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, librarians met with decision makers in the Graduate School and the Office of Legal Affairs 'to discuss the implications of these complaints and decide on the policy. The Office of Legal Affairs gave input that there was no requirement to mandate students to enter into an agreement with ProQuest (or any other third party) as a condition of graduation.'¹² Concerns about diminishing Georgia Tech’s presence in the ProQuest database were assuaged with the recognition that their SMARTech repository held 100 percent of their theses and dissertations, while ProQuest held just 35 percent ... How can graduate students gain the greatest exposure for their scholarship in a post-ProQuest world? There are many effective options. Most common is dissemination through their university’s own digital repository. Not only do ETDs in open access repositories see immediate exposure through search engines such as Google and Google Scholar, they also can be made harvestable by ETD-specific discovery platforms such as the Union Catalog of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (ndltd.org) and the Open Access ETD portal (OATD.org). At some institutions, ETDs in the digital repository are also included in inter-institutional ETD databases such as OhioLink’s ETD Center and Texas Digital Library’s Texas ETD Repository ..."