Phantom plagiarists, academic boogeymen, and open access fears that go bump in the night : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Some of you may have read about the recent call from the American Historical Association to Ph.D.-granting universities to permit their recently credentialed historians to leave their dissertations off-line for six years in order to give the junior scholar time to revise the dissertation for publication.   I read through the AHA statement, the New York Times article on the subject, and a blog post by Berkeley biologist and open access advocate Michael Eisen (courtesy of Comradde PhysioProffe).  I agree entirely with Eisen.  The AHA position is wrongheaded, although I’ve got some different reasons to disagree with the call to embargo disseratations than Eisen has.  Let me explain:  First of all, when I heard about this controversy, it sounded to me like some of the more paranoid fantasies from graduate school that circulate among young scholars masquerading as advice ... These are stories of scholarly skullduggery that are famous as grad school urban legends, but I’ve never actually seen or heard of anything like this happening to any specific person in 23 years.  All variations on this story have the same implied moral, which is that scholarly generosity and engagement is foolish, and secrecy and aggressive self-interest is prudent or even virtuous.  And that seems to me to be the exact opposite of how to succeed as a professional historian.  So to my ears, the fear that university presses will see an electronic copy of a dissertation as a reason to decline publishing a quality monograph seems equally paranoid, for at least few reasons: [1] There is no evidence that this is even a real problem.  The Times article makes this very clear, which makes me wonder why they published the story in the first place ...   [2] Even university presses these days like to pretend that they’re not publishing revised dissertations.  This is a weird newish fetish.  I was specifically warned against using the word 'dissertation' at all in the acknowledgements of my book,even though my book was a totally new project and not based at all on my dissertation,because (as I was told by the copyeditor) 'we don’t want readers to think this project was originally a dissertation.'  Because. . . ?  Because it’s not, but I didn’t see why I needed to pretend that I hadn’t been to graduate school ... [3[ If you’ve written a dissertation, it’s already available in hard copy to anyone with access to interlibrary loan or a credit card and the University Microfilms International website or phone number, even if it’s not (yet) downloadable on WorldCat, which it probably is if it was completed in this century.  I’m amazed that no one has yet pointed this out, but the point of the dissertation is that it’s an original piece of research that’s meant to be shared.  Dissertations are published research, albeit they have traditionally not circulated as widely as books or journal articles ...  [4] If your concern is plagiarism (per the aforementioned urban legend), get over yourself.  If you’ve written a dissertation based on archival research and creative analysis, and you’ve gone to the trouble of finding new documents or unearthing long-neglected sources, it will be nearly impossible to steal or otherwise plagiarize your work.  In other words, if you’ve been a good graduate student–put the time in in the archives, given a few conference papers, or even published an article or two–your work is more than likely perfectly safe, because stealing or plagiarizing it will be so obviously traceable to you ... [5] Finally, how much time and effort do you think other people put into thinking about you and/or your dissertation?  Srsly.  If you’re lucky, your dissertation advisor read every page and gave you substantial comments on the whole thing, but honestly:  she’s probably the only one, and if she was that faithful and conscientious, count yourself lucky, because not all advisors are like this ... This whole issue calls to mind something