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.