From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 19:02:41 -0500
My hesitation about Jim's proposal is that during my 45+ years in
acquiring books for two university presses, I have had the privilege
of working with authors of many revised dissertations that turned out
to be major successes in every way, both in sales and in critical
reception. Just to mention two among many off the top of my head,
Susan Okin's WOMEN IN WESTERN POLITICAL THOUGHT and Peter Evans's
DEPENDENT DEVELOPMENT played critical roles in their respective fields
of feminist political philosophy and comparative politics and became
staples in many college classrooms, selling in the tens of thousands
of copies. Had the authors been told to shelve their dissertations
and move on to new work, the world would have been deprived of the
considerable intellectual value these books brought to their
respective disciplines. I daresay they would not have been
"discovered" as UMI products and turned into books if the authors had
not been encouraged to do so, both by their academic advisors and me
as an acquiring editor. The latest such example I can give is a
revised dissertation in the field of history itself, which was awarded
the top prize of the Latin American Studies Association at its annual
convention in 2012:
http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03769-1.html. I think
Jim does a disservice to such authors in suggesting that they only
"lightly" revise their dissertations.
Sandy Thatcher
P.S. Whether the AHA's new policy is well justified or not I do not
want to address here. The Chronicle will be following up the original
story with more discussion to come. Stay tuned....
> From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 19:37:58 -0400
>
> Academics are buzzing about the American Historical Association's
> recommendation that history dissertations be eligible at author's
> choice for an embargo from open internet dissemination for up to six
> years. (Text below my sig.) To one who in my provost days read a lot
> of tenure dossiers, this seems a one-variable attempt to address a
> complex problem. It is essentially the members of the AHA, as senior
> faculty reviewing junior colleagues, who have created the dependency
> on the university presses, who have in turn pushed back by insisting
> on publishing only books that are really worth publishing as books,
> whatever their former history.
>
> Wouldn't we be better served by a system that encouraged people to do
> good work in graduate school and put it behind them to climb new
> mountains as quickly as possible? Instead, we have folks who spend a
> decade lightly revising a book and then discover that their thirties
> and half their forties have elapsed in the meantime and somehow fresh
> ideas and fresh ambition have gotten harder to find.
>
> It's probably unrealistic to evoke the days when the dissertation was
> in fact published -- printed, bound, distributed to libraries, at
> candidate's expense -- and the scholar could move on to fresh work
> immediately. I knew a man, born 1925, who got his PhD at Catholic U.
> in Washington in about 1960 and was the first rebel who refused to do
> this and sent his off instead to the newfangled "University
> Microfilms" (as then was), which had sprung up as the low-cost,
> high-tech path to swift publication; but access to work on a microfilm
> in Ann Arbor was cumbersome and rarely achieved. With vastly easier
> access, it would be easy to speed up the process dramatically; and
> greater transparency would put pressure on advisors and students to
> make better dissertations.
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> Georgetown U.
>
>
> The American Historical Association strongly encourages graduate
> programs and university libraries to adopt a policy that allows the
> embargoing of completed history PhD dissertations in digital form for
> as many as six years. Because many universities no longer keep hard
> copies of dissertations deposited in their libraries, more and more
> institutions are requiring that all successfully defended
> dissertations be posted online, so that they are free and accessible
> to anyone who wants to read them. At the same time, however, an
> increasing number of university presses are reluctant to offer a
> publishing contract to newly minted PhDs whose dissertations have been
> freely available via online sources. Presumably, online readers will
> become familiar with an author's particular argument, methodology, and
> archival sources, and will feel no need to buy the book once it is
> available. As a result, students who must post their dissertations
> online immediately after they receive their degree can find themselves
> at a serious disadvantage in their effort to get their first book
> published; it is not unusual for an early-career historian to spend
> five or six years revising a dissertation and preparing the manuscript
> for submission to a press for consideration. During that period, the
> scholar typically builds on the raw material presented in the
> dissertation, refines the argument, and improves the presentation
> itself. Thus, although there is so close a relationship between the
> dissertation and the book that presses often consider them
> competitors, the book is the measure of scholarly competence used by
> tenure committees.
>
> In the past, most dissertations were circulated through inter-library
> loan in the form of a hard copy or on microfilm for a fee. Either way,
> gaining access to a particular dissertation took time and special
> effort or, for microfilm, money. Now, more and more university
> libraries are archiving dissertations in digital form, dispensing with
> the paper form altogether. As a result, an increasing number of
> graduate programs have begun requiring the digital filing of a
> dissertation. Because no physical copy is available, making the
> digital one accessible becomes the only option. However, online
> dissertations that are free and immediately accessible make possible a
> form of distribution that publishers consider too widespread to make
> revised publication in book form viable.
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