American Historical Association Says Scholars Should Lock Up Their Dissertations For Up To Six Years
from the tenure-committees-and-publishers-are-the-real-artifacts dept
For years, scientific research funded with tax dollars has been consigned to a sterile life locked up behind publishers' paywalls. The argument is that paywall fees fund scholarship, and without these fees, no one would be properly incentivized to... well, lock up published research behind paywalls. (Roughly paraphrased from journal publishers' defense of their business model.)
That's the scientific end of the spectrum: publicly-funded research locked away from the public eye in order to benefit the slim minority that can afford access. Sadly, historical dissertations aren't meant to be shared with the public either, at least not according to the American Historical Society, which recently released this statement in support of embargoing online copies of PhD dissertations.
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.Six years seems like an arbitrarily long time to lock up dissertations. The AHA points out that many universities are shifting towards a "paperless" library of dissertations and encouraging completed works to be published online where they can be accessed by anybody. That sounds more ideal than a six-year embargo. What's the AHA's rationale?
[A]n 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.This may be true. Of course, it also may be true that readers, online or not, will feel no need to buy the book one way or the other. The other difference, which the AHA addresses, is that the book and the dissertation are often significantly dissimilar, as the dissertation is refined over a number of years before being considered book-ready. This would seem to indicate that an online dissertation would not displace a significant number of book sales. But the AHA feels otherwise:
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.This seems to argue two things at once, and this bizarre argument isn't entirely of the AHA's making. Publishers consider the two (book/dissertation) to be competitors despite the "five or six years" of revision and preparation. Tenure committees view only the published work (read: book) as the true end product.
So, there are two forces at work here, and both are holding back the dissemination of information. Publishers are reluctant to offer publication to scholars whose works (even in "draft" form) are available for free online. Tenure committees insist that only books are the "true" measure of scholarly competence. This handily places all of the power in publishers' hands.
The AHA's statement doesn't help diffuse this concentration of power.
History has been and remains a book-based discipline, and the requirement that dissertations be published online poses a tangible threat to the interests and careers of junior scholars in particular. Many universities award tenure only to those junior faculty who have published a monograph within six years of receiving the PhD. With the online publication of dissertations, historians will find it increasingly difficult to persuade publishers to make the considerable capital investments necessary to the production of scholarly monographs.That first sentence isn't strictly true -- although it is accurate. History remains a book-based discipline only because tenure committees won't move on from their "if it's not a published book, it doesn't count" metric. And that's the real problem. It's the tenure committees who are stuck in the past, and their reluctance to revise their standards to meet current realities is allowing publishers to control the circulation of published dissertations.
Forward-thinking universities are moving to online catalogs and encouraging scholars to upload their dissertations and make them openly available. These efforts are undercut by the stasis of their tenure committees -- the entity most in need of change. In AHA's defense, recommending authors embargo their work makes sense, but only because the tenure process insists on scholars delivering something in book form in order to be considered.
Unfortunately, it is in these scholars' best interests to play by the rules if they wish pursue tenure, and the AHA's statement diplomatically lays out the facts and recommends the best course of action considering the screwed up processes involved. But the AHA might better serve its members in the future by pushing for tenure committees to update their review process, rather than allowing them to continue demanding the future adhere to the standards of the past.
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Filed Under: dissertations, history, journals, pay walls
Companies: american historical association
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Lock up your daughters as well, I'm around...
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Old historian shouts at cloud
Save the antiquated publishing model to preserve the formalized steps for a career path that no longer exists!
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Btw. A well written piece, good work!
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Wow - what a bunch of ignorant dumbasses.
Hopefully their target audience tells them to go pound sand
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They do this because they think having absolute control over a work equates to greater profits. And this false assumption is the source of their current dilemma.
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I say go ahead make yourself less relevant to the general population.
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If someone found a way to block out sunlight and charge a fee for access, they would. In fact, I'm rather surprised that the internet doesn't yet have a pay-per-click surcharge.
Gotta make themselves MO MONEY.
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Re:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax
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Re: Re:
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Re: Re:
Well would you look at that, it's one of the grandfathers of the 'you must be a pirate' taxes.
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Working in photonics
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My diss has been available online and here are the results: people in the field read it and invited me to participate in panels and conferences and cited it in their published research. It is even cited in Wikipedia articles. This is the purpose of research, to share your findings! As I revised it into a (different) book manuscript, my growing reputation as an expert in this area helped me get a book contract. I consider the online diss to have promoted and helped my academic career, not harmed it.
Publishers should consider online dissertations as a form of free marketing--stimulating interest in advance of its more developed publication as a book. Tenure committees should give credit to other metrics for scholarly impact than print publications. University presses would benefit from publishing more monographs as E-books, but tenure committees need to accept this for "credit" toward tenure.
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Re: Cynthia Meyers, above
By way of information: I was offered a contract from a small niche academic press to publish a lightly-revised version of my dissertation. It would have appeared only in hardback, and would have cost more than $100 per book. Expected sales, a few hundred copies -- mostly to large university library systems.
I declined the contract. And between them, the two freely available electronic versions of my dissertation have been downloaded more than 4500 times.
Academics care about influence, about being noticed, and about contributing to their field. Embargoing a dissertation will make a young academic less visible, and make the dissertation nearly impossible for others to cite. Cynthia's approach is a much better model.
(Incidentally, the biggest financial winner might be UMI, not the academic presses.)
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Re:
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Profit is a powerful incentive but me thinks it can go much further than that. History is a form of investigative journalism for really old news.
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American Historical Association Cop Out
How the hell are we meant to write about great events if people stop making the same mistakes.
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6 years only why not 80
lets see how an uneducated lot reacts to anything
lets see hwo it lives shorter and thus pays less taxes over its lifespans
lets make humanity as stupid as we can experiment
GO USA
meanwhile the rest of the world will move on and past you at lightspeed now....you will be africanized in no time...
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Homework
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Re: Homework
Take a look at a couple and see what you think:
http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/1632
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap:10:0::NO:10 :P10_ACCESSION_NUM:bgsu1193529137
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