From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2012 08:32:29 -0500

I agree that this student was ill served by his university (though he
might have paid more attention himself to reading the contract he
signed), but I would also guess that many universities do a much
better job of educating their graduate students than this university
did. I served on the ETD task force that oversaw the transition to
submission of electronic dissertations at Penn State, and we provided
graduate students there with thorough information on all aspects of
the process, including publishing and copyright (the sections on which
I wrote myself): http://www.etd.psu.edu/. Penn State was hardly alone
in providing this kind of information to its graduate students.

Sandy Thatcher

P.S. Please also read my comment to the Chronicle article, toward the end.


> From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2012 20:10:26 -0700
>
> A Cautionary Tale"
>
> http://chronicle.com/article/Dissertation-for-Sale-A/132401/
>
> This article from CHE reports a recent Ph.D.'s startled experience of
> finding that because he checked a box without thinking on the form
> with which he deposited his dissertation with ProQuest, his
> dissertation was now available for sale for $32 on the Nook reader.
> He objects, I think rightly, and I hope he can reverse the
> box-checking.
>
> But what has changed is interesting.  It was always possible to obtain
> some or all of most dissertations by writing away to Ann Arbor.  But
> the process was cumbersome.  Intellectual access to the existence of a
> dissertation came through the indices to the bound volumes of
> *Dissertation Abstracts*; ordering the product was done by hand and
> surface post; and the product was at best a grainy print from a
> microfilm of a typescript.  Few bothered.
>
> Now it is a matter of femtoseconds for the metadata about the
> dissertation to be searched by robots; a few more femtoseconds to
> create the availability in a given format; and the product available
> is searchable, handsome, and easily gotten.  It's all gotten easier.
>
> And of course the original notion of a dissertation was that it was a
> published work of scholarship; the deposit of dissertation was
> technically "publication" (microfilm at Ann Arbor replaced the old
> practice of the privately printed dissertation paid for by the
> candidate), but I dare say few if any dissertation-submitters today
> think of the deposit as publication in any meaningful sense.  What to
> do? At a minimum, candidates could use better information about their
> options and the consequences of their options.
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> Georgetown University