From Library Babel Fish, July 31, 2013
A friend asked me on Twitter if the recent debate about whether to embargo dissertations wasn’t overblown, given it was prompted by a draft statement about giving students in some programs in one discipline a choice. Why all the fuss? I think the embargo debate, like the MOOC debate, has been about much more than dissertation licenses and the impact of MOOCs. These topics draw heat because they call on people’s assumptions, aspirations, anger, and anxieties about the future of academia. Which is to say our own futures.
A lot of claims and counterclaims have been made in the battle of #AHAgate, leaving us with some complex questions. Is the dissertation the author’s intellectual property, with all rights reserved, or does the university granting the degree have some claim on it? Or does ProQuest, or the world at large? What is scholarship worth and who decides? What choice do we have? Who is to blame?
That’s in addition to a lot of factual quibbles. Circle the right answer: Libraries do / do not avoid purchasing books based on open dissertations. Publishers do / do not reject book proposals based on open access dissertations. It’s a good thing / a disaster that my dissertation is open access.
Some claims are uninformed: “Of course access to dissertations should be free. That work was paid for by the public, so belongs to the public.” Um, no. If you got through your PhD without debt thanks to public funding, please don’t rub it in. It doesn’t work that way for historians.
And then there’s “This is the 21st century!” No argument there, but so what? And “Dissertations are dreary, unreadable exercises in making mountains out of molehills and nobody wants to read them anyway.” That’s a silly, facile generalization.
The one that surprised me the most: “ProQuest (or the university) made me sign something, so I guess they own the copyright.” I’m pretty sure you hold the copyright and granted ProQuest (and/or possibly your institution) a non-exclusive license to do whatever that license says they can do. Some argue that forcing copyright holders to put their work online essentially renders their copyright unexploitable and so is the same as taking the copyright. That’s debatable, but it’s a decision made by the program involved. Though libraries often have a role to play, they don’t make the rules, and sometimes arrangements for electronic deposit with ProQuest, including the language of the license, are made without the knowledge or input of the library.
What we saw with #AHAgate is the agitated flipping of a two-sided coin. We have the ability to share information globally at far less expense and much more quickly than ever before. As Clay Shirky famously said, the internet allows us to do “big things for love.” As millions of people have pointed out since, that all depends on having an income that pays the rent and allows enough leisure time to go around loving big things. As the old revenue models for publishing h