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.