The resistance to using digital media to distribute scholarly works reminds me of the early resistance to the printing press by the highly-educated and skilled guild of the scribes. But some places are getting it, like Louisiana State University:
The world of scholarship depends on people making their research available to others. When that is done electronically, more people can get access at lower cost, and more knowledge transfer occurs. This can stimulate education and research. It also can ensure that many people give credit to you for your work, and that your research is cited in others’ publications, which adds to your prestige and can help your future advancement. We can log all accesses and provide a report to you of the count, to pass on to your supervisors, if you request this.
Since we aim to maximize access, which seems especially appropriate for a land grant university, we will not charge and so will not have any royalties to share.BA
Before theses and dissertations were available electronically, not many were read. Electronic access multiplies the number of times works are read by a factor of ten or more. Since you spent a great deal of time on your research, it should encourage you to know that others are reading that work. Your literature review may guide others, and your results may save others the time of redoing your study.
With electronic theses and dissertations, students and universities can more easily share knowledge, with much lower costs. We believe that about 200,000 theses or dissertations are completed each year. It would greatly aid graduate education if as many as possible of these were freely available.
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There’s also a point to keeping theses and dissertations secret — secrecy keeps people from being able to judge the quality of a school’s graduates for themselves.
Certification schemes, like the one in education, and like other forms of competence licensing, acts like a kind of firewall — a way of certifying that someone is competent, which helps shield that person from any further inquiry into the basis for that conclusion.
Imagine some middling school releasing its graduate students’ theses and dissertations for the world to see. Then some enterprising journalist decides to evaluate the scholarly output, perhaps as a means of getting a more quantitative assessment of that school’s place in the rankings. He could run those dissertations through a grammar checker, or one of those programs that analyzes the grade level of the writer (most newspapers come in at around 8th grade, last I heard). Or, he could pick out a few representative examples of sub-par writing and scholarship, and use it as an example of the kind of output that School X grants a Ph.D. for.
It’s an educrat’s nightmare.
Recently I learned of a very interesting research technique from a Google search. It brought me to someone’s Master’s Thesis and they employed an Autoethnographic method.
There’s also a point to keeping theses and dissertations secret — secrecy keeps people from being able to judge the quality of a school’s graduates for themselves.
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