OUDaily.com | Dean speaks with concerned post-grad students about delaying publishing theses online

"After graduate students expressed concerns about their dissertations and theses being published for free online, the Graduate College dean confirmed that OU will approve requests to delay online publishing on a case-by-case basis. Graduate College Dean Lee Williams met with graduate students for nearly two hours on Wednesday to answer questions about their work getting published online. Students were concerned about a policy that said they could request only a three to six-month delay before their work was published online, said Shannon Toll, English Ph.D. candidate. Students in certain disciplines rely on immediate access to their work, but if they plan on sending their work to traditional publication houses, they’ll need several years before their work can be freely disseminated online. 'Publishers don’t want to publish something that’s freely available to everybody — it just doesn’t make good business sense,' said English Ph.D. candidate Brian Hudson in an interview on Tuesday. After six days, the petition had 115 supporters. 'We thought that they were trying to impose a very short amount of time, whereas the amount of time we wanted would be a lot longer,' Toll said. 'A one-size-fits-all approach isn’t going to work.' In the meeting, Williams said he would speak with department heads to develop a system where each department would provide input on how long students could request to delay online publication, Toll said ... "