Equanimity toward Open Access ETD’s: An initial response to ‘Closing the Deal’ by Hawkins, Kimball and Ives | Free US ETDs (FUSE)

"A provocative new critique of Open Access theses and dissertations is already causing quite a stir within the ETD community. 'Closing the Deal: Coercion, Ethics and the Enthusiasms for Open Access' [1] accuses the confederacy of American university administrators, academic librarians, and graduate school personnel with nothing less than graduate student oppression by wantonly distributing theses and dissertations freely over the Internet. The authors — each a Humanities faculty member on a Texas campus — lay 26 charges at the feet of the American ETD community. The alleged offenses range from 'cajoling, arm-twisting and even coercing students into .. surrendering the copyright to their dissertations and theses' to biasing ETD formatting guidelines to 'stack the deck in favor of OA.' In their wholesale disapprobation of the ETD community, Hawkins, Kimball and Ives take no prisoners, also censuring: [1] the Association of Research Libraries, accused of encouraging its membership to sell OA to their university administrators using manipulative tactics befitting a high pressure salesman; [2] the commercial dissertation distributor, ProQuest LLC, who allegedly circulates misleading advertising materials erroneously claiming that dissertations are peer-reviewed; [3] and the non-profit academic consortium, Texas Digital Library, for carelessly releasing embargoed dissertations in disregard for their respective authors’ express wishes."