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Today we are honored to have a guest post by Kathryn Hume, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University and author of Surviving Your Academic Job Hunt: Advice for Humanities PhDs (revised edition, 2010).
I got in touch with Kathryn Hume initially to send her a fan email! I really like her book and will be reviewing it here on the blog soon. When I invited her to consider writing a guest post, she immediately responded with an idea to write about ProQuest, and the impact that electronic dissertation storage is having on the rules of publishing, and potentially on your tenure case. Thank you, Professor Hume, for sharing your insights.
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Once upon a time, dissertations were “available” through UMI as microfilm or through Interlibrary Loan as bound copies. In either case, you knew that you were not supposed to quote from the document or use its ideas without permission from the author. In the case of a hardbound copy, the libraries had records of the borrowers, so misappropriation could, in theory, be traced. Since you knew the material was unusable without permission, you felt free to ignore dissertations, except to make sure that a recent one was not too similar to the one that you hoped to write, lest it get published before yours and scoop you. Yes, such documents were technically “available,” but they were definitely not published or easily consultable.
Electronic dissertation storage changes the rules. Universities have enthusiastically assumed that a thesis online is just a faster and handier form of microfilm, and dissertation supervisors have assumed that since they put their theses on microfilm, you should put yours on ProQuest. They are wrong. Once available through any form of open access, be it ProQuest or a university library’s public access materials, that dissertation is functionally published, though this does not constitute refereed publication. Without the quality control implied by refereeing, ProQuest “publication” will not count for tenure. Furthermore, its being there may interfere with your landing a revised version at a reputable press. You could ruin your chances of getting tenure if your thesis is freely available.
In the Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com/article/From-Dissertation-to-Book/127677/), Leonard Cassuto sums up a round table discussion among six academic publishers as follows:
Don’t make your dissertation available online. Book editors seem unanimous on that point for obvious reasons. Many university libraries routinely add dissertations to their electronic holdings. If yours does, then opt out. If your thesis is already online, then have it taken down. Information may want to be free, as the earliest hacker generation first avowed, but if it’s free, then you can’t expect a publisher to pay for it, even in a later version.
At present, this is a disaster waiting to happen rather than a battlefield covered with the bodies of humanists denied tenure because presses would not even look at their manuscripts, but warning signals are going up. I have heard of two commercial-academic presses and one university press that insisted the dissertation be removed from ProQuest before they would consider it. I have also learned of a major journal’s response to the issue. A job hunter at my school took a chapter from his recently defended dissertation and turned it into an article. He sent it off and the journal wrote back to ask whether this was from a chapter in a thesis on ProQuest; if so, they would not look at it because they considered it already published. The same could happen to your article or book manuscript.
Numerous universities have made putting dissertations on ProQuest a requirement. Others will permit you to block that process and renew the block, at least for a while. Whenever that protection runs out, though, ProQuest or the library or both will make the piece available. Your university may argue that a state institution receives public money, so part of its mission is to make its research available to that same public. Fair enough, but you must still try to ensure that your university can and will remove a dissertation from open access if asked. Refusal to create that mechanism could destroy the careers of its humanities PhDs.
This may prove to be an issue that dies without much consequence. Not all fields, even within the humanities, operate on the same assumptions, and some people see dissertations cited as a way of boosting your visibility within your specialty. Presses may eventually decide to ignore ProQuest dissertations and rely on the degree to which you have revised your material. Or they may just settle for your taking the document off line until after your book is in print. Various professional societies have argued that the thesis monograph should not serve as the basis for a tenure decision, and tenure itself may disappear some day. Obviously, such changes would affect the significance of your dissertation’s being available online.
For the present, though, none of these outcomes is assured, and the more radical are not likely to happen soon, so protect yourselves!
- Read your graduate office requirements now, not the week you hope to hand in your thesis.
- If your university requires public access, get your department to raise the issue with the university’s lawyers and its Ethics Committee or Ombudsperson.
- Try to get your graduate school to establish a mechanism for removing your thesis from open access should that prove necessary.
- If you can block access for a limited time with renewals, tattoo the renewal date on the back of your hand, with room for subsequent dates to be added.
Revising a humanities dissertation into a book can take far more effort than you realize. If you are moving from one temporary job to the next, having to pay for moves with nonexistent savings, and teaching six or more new courses each year, you will need to remember and act on successive deadlines despite many distractions. Ideally, you revise your manuscript during the first two years of your tenure clock. If you are lucky, you land your manuscript at a press within the next four years. Perhaps it will be in print a year after that. Only then should you let your dissertation go on line.
Good Luck!
I disagree profoundly on a few points here, and these will annoy many people!
The first that comes to mind is that a dissertation is not a book; however brilliant your dissertation is, a publisher will probably want something very different. Publishers want something that will sell and the conceptual scaffolding which you carefully constructed to “show your workings” to a dissertation committee will go to 2 footnotes and the bin. A good publisher knows that what they can get out of you 2 years after you complete the dissertation will be a much better product that the dissertation.
Secondly, I don’t accept the point that a dissertation has no or inadequate quality control. It has a different sort of quality control to the double-blind reading a publisher will give it, but it still the output of an examination process, and if it is not good enough, then you should not have passed.
The third issue I have is that this is grounded in assumptions about the dissertation-publication-tenure path which no longer hold. The old Phd-published monograph-tenured post track is broken at several points.
Phd output in many disciplines exceeds the pool of academic jobs, so many Phd grads will no longer get academic posts, and many dissertations will never be published. If they are not online, they are dead.
Realistically, given the competition out there, if the bright core of your thesis is not already on the path or publication in a peer-reviewed journal, you won’t even make a shortlist for an interview – as far as I can see, book plus two articles is now the minimum in many fields. Articles are much more serious competition for a book than a pdf on any repository, but they are also some evidence that the person has something to say, so it cuts both ways.
Publishers have priced monographs out of the marketplace. I’ve seen monographs routinely priced at anything from €65 to €150; that represents an unjustifiable slice slice of my share of the library book fund; and if I can’t justify buying a copy, it doesn’t go on my class booklist and I don’t cite it.
my 2c
Mike
Thanks for the warning (although I am long past being able to take it). That said, does this beg the question of whether using publications as criteria for tenure needs to be reconsidered? Perhaps we need peer-reviewed on-line journals — I believe there are quite a few already in existence — run by people who recognize the difference between the two uses of “free” regarding information (hint: it isn’t the same as “free beer”). In my opinion, this system needs to change, and while warning people about how their careers could be damaged by being “published” on ProQuest is valuable, it also tacitly supports a system of scholarship that may be badly in need of change.
I agree the system has to change and probably is, as we speak. I just hope, while expectations are in flux, that the tenure casualties are kept to a minimum.
This is a really interesting post and discussion and I hope it gets more exposure — although the issue may be being discussed more widely than I realize.
My university requires ProQuest and we’re all horrified. I see Mike and Scott’s points but not to have a choice in this matter is really irritating. It’s one thing to have it in Ann Arbor microfilm but up online in dissertation form is too much of a violation, feels like robbery.
I especially object to the university’s propaganda which tells graduate students they are “publishing their dissertation” and that it is an “opportunity.”
I know this is a year old, but I’m hoping for a reply…. In Canada, we’re pretty well required to sign permissions for ProQuest to have our dissertations. How can one undo this? You seem to imply that one can assert one’s copyright to the detriment of ProQuest. But how?
Oh dear, thsi was a guest post. I know nothing about ProQuest from personal experience. I’ll check with the author and see what she says.
From Prof. Hume: “I said nothing about copyright. I simply said that Proquest admitted that one could remove something, and the graduate school here proved helpful and helped four students remove theirs. I do not know how Canadian law fits in; where I ran into the most important hurdle was the sense of the grad school that as a semi-public university, our research was supposed to be available to the public.
However, given the info on how this could affect publication as a book and given the word I had from another school hammering this out that a press had refused to consider something unless it had been removed from proquest, the grad school at my institution backed off on demanding that. Thus, the undoing will have to be through the individual school.
> If you can block access for a limited time with renewals, tattoo the
> renewal date on the back of your hand, with room for subsequent dates to be added.
For what it’s worth: though the ProQuest form distributed by my graduate institution, which I was required to submit along with the diss, had only 6-month, 1-yr, and 2-yr embargo options, I simply sent a letter to ProQuest, along with the form, saying I wanted an indefinite embargo. And ProQuest has thus far honored this for almost three years with no need for renewal.
Also, although some schools require that a diss author not set a ProQuest embargo for longer than a specified period, it’s not clear to me how that school could enforce this once a Ph.D. recipient is no longer a student there. For instance, my current school is now considering requiring graduates to get approval from their former diss advisors in order to extend an embargo. But, aside from degree revocation, what mechanism would even be available to an institution in order to compel a degree-in-hand graduate to allow ProQuest to post the work?
This post makes me sad because when I was in college I loved looking up dissertations on ProQuest. I found all my professors’ (at least the abstracts) and read about half of them (one of which got me through a really fun trip that unfortunately had a lot of downtime and no internet). I mean, I get why someone might not want them up there. But I liked them, often better than the “officially” published books.
I agree with Eileen. Having dissertations online allow others to read about the academic work of others in their original, honest form.