Stanford has officially begun to publish doctoral dissertations online. Here’s the rub:
While the chance to put their work online for public viewing was enthusiastically endorsed by students in the sciences, there were more concerns from the humanities students, said Richard Roberts, a history professor who chairs the university’s committee on graduate studies.
“Science students are used to having their papers published quickly as journal articles,” he said. “But the ‘tenure book’ is very important in the humanities, and students were worried that making their work instantly accessible might affect publishers’ decisions later on.”
The problem was solved by allowing the graduate students to embargo their work for up to five years, to give them time to get it published. They also will be allowed to decide whether to release either 20 or 100 percent of their dissertation to Google.
I have nothing especially to add to this–sounds like a good solution to me–but I wonder if this doesn’t say something about the limits of how we do things in the social sciences. I would have thought that an ideal solution would be to simply rely less on one single-author book publication as a measure of academic success. But, like most people, I have nothing especially in the way of a better idea.
Tags: dissertations, online publication, publication, Stanford