Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities? Findings from a 2011 Survey of Academic Publishers

Abstract

An increasing number of higher education institutions worldwide are requiring submission of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) by graduate students and are subsequently providing open access to these works in online repositories. Faculty advisors and graduate students are concerned that such unfettered access to their work could diminish future publishing opportunities. This study investigated social sciences, arts, and humanities journal editors’ and university press directors’ attitudes toward ETDs. The findings indicate that manuscripts that are revisions of openly accessible ETDs are always welcome for submission or considered on a case-by-case basis by 82.8 percent of journal editors and 53.7 percent of university press directors polled.

Dissertation-to-Book Publication Patterns Among a Sample of R1 Institutions

“…One commonly voiced concern is the potentially diminished future publishing opportunities for graduate students who make their thesis or dissertation openly accessible. Similar to others (Ramirez, Dalton, McMillan, Read, & Seamans, 2013), we also had evidence from our own institution that graduate student authors were restricting access to their ETDs and that university faculty were advising students to restrict access due to concerns about publishers' perceptions about prior publication. The University of Oklahoma (OU) began depositing ETDs into its institutional repository in the fall of 2013 and almost immediately received pushback from the university community.…”

Dissertation to Book? A Snapshot of Dissertations Published As Books in 2014 and 2015, Available in Open Access Institutional Repositories

“…E-books were not included because electronic editions of books are often published subsequent to print editions, and not every print edition has an electronic version. The Ramírez articles (Ramírez et al, 2013;Ramírez et al, 2014) mentioned previously surveyed print publishers. The authors also felt that mixing in electronic editions could complicate the data in ways that would be difficult to address.…”

“…Smaller publishers were less likely to want to consider EDTs available in IRs. Some university presses would not consider them under any circumstances in certain subject areas including romance literature, applied and social psychology, and mathematical methods in social sciences (Ramírez et al, 2013). Libraries, it appeared-at least anecdotally, from publisher comments-were implicated, in that vendors were reporting that some libraries were eliminating books published from dissertations as part of their approval plan profiles.…”

“…Bennett and Flanagan (2016) examined the impact of open access dissertations and found no correlation between downloads and the number of citations for the titles they surveyed and that subsequent published work seemed to be necessary for the dissertation to receive more citations. Two companion articles published in College & Research Libraries in 2013 and 2014 report on research that surveyed journal and book publishers about their willingness to publish material from theses and dissertations, particularly those available in an institutional repository (Ramírez et al, 2013;Ramírez et al, 2014). Overall, they found that in the case of the humanities and social sciences, 82.8% of journal editors and 53.7% of university press directors would consider publishing material already available in an open institutional repository, and 89.5% of science editors would either welcome or consider these submissions, provided they were revised.…”

“…Intrigued by students at their institution who were concerned about the likelihood of being able to publish material from their dissertation if it was in their IR, the authors undertook the present study to determine how many dissertations published as books were actually in IRs, and whether one could discern any patterns among publishers in two years' worth of data. We analyzed in particu-lar whether publishers behaved in the ways they claimed to behave as reported by Ramirez and colleagues (Ramírez, Dalton, McMillan, Read, & Seamans, 2013;Ramírez, McMillan, Dalton, Hanlon, Smith, & Kern, 2014). To address this question, the following exploratory research questions were examined.…”