April 3, 2011
The Road From Dissertation to Book Has a New Pothole: the Internet
Libraries’ digital open-access rules make some editors wary of buying graduate
students’ work, although others see a marketing boost
By Jennifer Howard
Ann R. Hawkins, a professor of English at Texas Tech University, likes the idea of sharing research, but she’s worried that sharing has gone too far when it comes to students’ dissertations. Not long ago, Ms. Hawkins heard from a junior scholar who wanted her to consider his revised dissertation for a series she edits for Pickering & Chatto, an academic press. She liked the idea—until she discovered his work was fully accessible on the Internet. Few would buy the specialized book, she worried, if much of its contents was already freely available.
“The problem I have is when anyone can either find the dissertation immediately on Google or by going to the university page and just clicking it and downloading it, whether they are in the United States or Taiwan,” Ms. Hawkins says. Unless he could limit access, she told the hopeful author, she wouldn’t consider it for the series.
That is not what any author wants to hear, but it’s especially alarming for scholars at the beginning of their publishing careers. With jobs scarce, the pressure to produce a monograph that enhances their credentials is intense in many humanities and social-sciences fields. But more institutions now require master’s and Ph.D. candidates to submit work in electronic form, and it appears that the rules could make publishing and job-hunting even harder, at least in some cases.
The digital push is being driven by an understandable desire to make scholarship, some of it supported by public money, easily available. And bits and bytes don’t take up shelf space in cramped libraries the way bound dissertations do. But several series editors and publishers echo Hawkins’s concerns. “If authors have an opt-out option, I would recommend that they do opt out, at least until their first book is published,” says Ann Donahue, a senior editor at Ashgate Publishing Group, which puts out a number of books that began life as dissertations. (There is a similar set of issues around journal articles.)
Others, though, take the opposite view: Digital dissertations stand a better chance of getting published because, if a work is viewed or downloaded many times, that can signal there’s a readership for it. It’s an issue “with more angles than a geometry textbook,” says Patrick Alexander, director of Penn State University Press, in an e-mail.
Staying Offline
Brandon D. Shuler, now a Ph.D. candidate in the program of literature, social justice, and environment at Texas Tech, had his own moment of authorial vertigo brought on by a requirement that he submit his graduate work digitally. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Texas Pan-American and just published a heavily revised version of his thesis, on the work of a Texas outdoorsman and writer, with a university press. Mr. Shuler thought he had successfully navigated Pan American’s thesis rules, which mandate using a digital repository but didn’t like the rules at many institutions – allow him to embargo his work for a limited period of time. He thought he had done that. “They can publish it automatically unless you go through this Barnum & Bailey, Ringling Brothers, three-ring circus of hoops,” he says. “Then my publisher calls me and asks me if I’d had my thesis electronically published.” His editor had stumbled on a copy of the work online and had jitters about its being readily available.
Mr. Shuler had to get in touch directly with ProQuest, the electronic publisher with which the vast majority of U.S. universities contract to house digital copies of dissertations, and get the company to restrict access. According to Mr. Shuler, the process took about a month. “I’m working on my Ph.D.,” he says. “I really didn’t have time to be doing all this, but obviously with a book coming out, I had to get it done.”
ProQuest says it follows each institution’s and author’s instructions about how much of the work to make available (full text or abstract only, for instance), and on what schedule (immediately available, embargoed for a period of time, etc.). “We are the university’s partner in dissemination,” says Austin McLean, the company’s director of scholarly communication and dissertations publishing. “We go by what the universities require. We have a highly customized embargo option for universities.”
At the University of Illinois, the ProQuest agreement is one of the few areas that graduate students have had problems with since the university put into effect its new digital-repository policy, says Rebecca Bryant, assistant dean of the graduate college. Illinois receives about 1,200 master’s and doctoral theses every year, she says, and no longer accepts paper copies. The digital documents are deposited in the university’s repository, known as Ideals, as well as with ProQuest, which means that the student must also sign ProQuest’s publishing agreement. “It’s confusing to students, quite frankly, that they are basically asked to enter into two publishing agreements,” Ms. Bryant says.
She adds that “there are still great benefits to using ProQuest’s having one’s work listed in the major professional databases, for instance.
At Illinois, the default option is that work will go open access after two years; students may request an extension, although requests for a permanent embargo have to go through a special petition process. Since 2009, according to Ms. Bryant, 63 percent of graduate students have opted to make their work open access, about 20 percent have chosen campus-only access, and about 17 percent have chosen to keep their work off-limits altogether for now.
Publishing Dilemma
In the United States and beyond, there’s a push for more coordination of practices and standards in this area. The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations has been working since the 1990s to promote “the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations,” according to the group’s Web site. Statewide ETD (for electronic dissertations and theses) groups exist, and in May, the newly created U.S. Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association will hold its first conference.
Having clear standards and policies may help students understand and navigate their degree and graduation requirements, but it is not going to settle the question of whether ETD’s help or hurt their publishing chances. One publisher that views those chances as diminished by the digital availability of student work is Texas A&M University Press.
The press has become “much more reluctant to consider works based on dissertations than in the past,” says its director, Charles Backus. In an e-mail, he described his concern that online dissertations might cut into sales: The press has come to assume that “most libraries and library vendors will not buy or recommend purchase of ensuing books that are based substantially on them,” he wrote.
Ms. Donohue, of Ashgate Publishing, says she and her colleagues have similar concerns. The publisher does not yet have a firm policy in place regarding digital dissertations but has been thinking hard about the potential risks in recent months.
From Ms. Donohue’s perspective, work that’s behind a firewall of some sort doesn’t really pose a threat. “We’re really interested in the kind of open access where the dissertations turn up easily on a Google search,” she says.
Other scholarly publishers, however, see no need to worry. Jim McCoy, who directs the University of Iowa Press, which publishes a mix of fiction and nonfiction books, views open access as an opportunity. “Any dissertation that’s on the Internet and has taken on a life of its own, that would be a selling point to me,” Mr. McCoy says. “That would mean there’s a market out there for this material, and there could be an even greater market” for a revised, edited, well marketed version published by a scholarly press.
The novelist and short-story writer Sara Pritchard also has an optimistic view of open access and dissertations. In 2007 she was working as the marketing director for West Virginia University Press when it decided to publish Bringing Down the Mountains, by Shirley Stewart Burns. The book was based on her history Ph.D. dissertation on coal mining. The document was in the university’s repository, and a lot of people were looking at it. “We thought it was a good sign that her electronic dissertation was receiving so many hits (Shirley pointed this out to us) and that it boded well for sales of her book,” Ms. Pritchard said in an e-mail. “And her book has sold extremely well (used primarily as a textbook on mountaintop-removal coal mining—which is a big controversy).”
The creative-writing community, whose graduate students tend to be keenly focused on publishing, has had particular concerns about ETD’s. Ms. Pritchard’s own career offers evidence that putting creative work in a digital repository doesn’t necessarily get in the way of publishing it. She holds a master of fine arts degree from West Virginia and published a version of her M.F.A. thesis, a short-story collection, with Houghton Mifflin, just making sure to keep the thesis embargoed until the commercial book came out.
Mr. Alexander, the Penn State press director, says that for many presses, the decision becomes easier—and more likely to go the author’s way—when the proposed book differs significantly from the graduate-school version. “The more crucial question for us, especially in the case of a dissertation, is whether the author can explain the extent to which and how the submission differs from the original version,” he said via e-mail. A work written to satisfy a graduate committee should probably look very different from a book meant for a somewhat wider audience. That was true long before electronic repositories, and it holds true for dissertations in any format.
When scholars can show that they’ve reworked their projects with that in mind, Mr. Alexander expects that most university presses will remain open to considering their work. “The best advice I could give students … is to remember that books and dissertations are two distinct species,” he said.
Copyright 2011 The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Editor’s Note
At present, West Virginia University ETD policy allows masters of fine arts creative writing students to opt for an indefinite “campus access” restriction”. Creative writing faculty have indicated that it can take a decade or more for some students to publish their theses as a book, thus the case was made to allow this exception due to disciplinary publishing norms. Normally the “campus access” restriction defaults to open access after five years from date of graduation.
The University Libraries advocates unrestricted open access to ETDs whenever possible, if not now, eventually, as part of it’s mission to provide access to research as a publicly funded institution. Students may request to change their ETD distribution to open access at any time by simply sending an email request to the Libraries. We recommend that students try to strike a balance between restricting access to get published versus providing open access to gain notoriety. Students should research the policies of their prospective publishers and act accordingly. That is not to say one should act imprudently, however, one should also explore the potential opportunities. The examples of Sara Pritchard’s and Shirley Stewart Burns’ success with open access demonstrates that there are new possibilities for self-promotion in the online world.
In journal publishing world, this has been largely adopted into practice as a measure of success, known as “citation impact factor”—the number of times other researchers have cited one’s own research publication in other publications as well as relative prestige factor of the particular journals in which one has been cited. Of course, the book publishing market is a different, but there some definite correlations between popularity of an ETD (i.e. hit counts) and the economic value to a university press in estimating potential future sales, as Pritchard cited.
In reviewing WVU case studies I’ve done of various disciplines over the years, I’ve found that by far, granting open access to the ETD upon graduation has provided many more publishing and other career opportunities for our graduate student alumni. In fact, published library research studies have indicated over 80% of journal publishers have no problem with open access of the ETD.
The reality is that by graduation time, most students have either already published a chapter or more as journal articles, and they have received permission to include them in their ETD; or those who have not yet published, will require extensive revisions to revise and re-focus the thesis/dissertation chapter into the journal article format. Former University Press Director Pat Conner feels that even with book publishing, 99% of dissertation material requires extensive revisions before going to press—open access is welcomed as free advertising. Those who embrace open access often reap the benefits in this increasingly networked online world.
As we endeavor to increase human knowledge through providing open access to scholarly communications, my recommendations to our students concerning intellectual property issues are shaped by the voices of those very students and their faculty, as well as my own and others’ analyses and observations. I prefer to deal with reality over myth and fact over fiction. I agree with the final Chronicle statement, dissertations and books are different animals. Wouldn’t it be more productive if we spent more of our time and energy in promoting our students research and creative efforts rather than trying to banish them to obscurity?
John H. Hagen, Manager
WVU Institutional Repository Programs / Coordinator, ETD Program
