Re: Book on future of STM publishers

From: Jean-Claude Guédon <jean.claude.guedon_at_UMontreal.CA>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 08:07:17 -0400

I quite agree with Bernard Lang. There are better ways.

And, as a scholar, you might consider the loss in visibility (and hence
potantial authority) you will suffer for a mere 400 dollars.

Have you looked at the NDLTD site (http://www.ndltd.org)? I assume Stevan
pointed it out in his answer. He generally is very thorough in his use of
references.

The next ETD meeting, incidentally, where putting theses on-line for free
will be in Berlin. You might want to make a trip there.

Meanwhile, I encourage you to pull out of an obviously poor deal and place
your thesis on-line within a reputable open-access archive.

Best,

Jean-Claude Guédon


Le 19 Juillet 2002 04:42, M. Meier a écrit :
> As many of you wonder about the "outdated" media in which the dissertation
> is published, I will give you the obvious explanation: The University of
> Munich requires that all Ph.D manuscripts have to be handed in in print
> form, no online or CD-ROM version allowed. To recover the printing costs
> (appr. $ 400), every Ph.D. candidate tries to find a decent enough
> publisher to get at least a small percentage back. My publisher, a newly
> founded PoD boutique, would not be very happy if the book appeared as a
> free document on the www.
>
> Regards
>
> Michael Meier
>
> > This is an interesting point. In some disciplines, there is a tradition
> > of
> > writing journal articles based on one's PhD research -- some of them
> > perhaps
> > published before the thesis is written -- while in other fields the
> > practice is
> > to turn one's thesis into a book. However, the thesis itself, in its
> > original
> > form as an examination document, is usually made publicly available in
> > the library of its home university, and is indexed in various secondary
> > services
> > such as Dissertation Abstracts. If universities in future mostly have
> > OAI-
> > compliant servers, and theses are submitted in electronic as well as
> > printed
> > form, there seems to be no obstacle to each university mounting its own
> > theses
> > on its server for free worldwide access.
> >
> > But... Stevan often makes the point that his concern is purely with the
> > scholarly journal literature, which is given away by its authors, and
> > which
> > should be avialable free of charge to other scholars. He goes on to say
> > that
> > this argument does not apply to other kinds of publication for which
> > authors
> > are traditionally paid, which is the case with books, even scholarly
> > books. On
> > that argument, having to pay 30 Euros for Meier's book is o.k.
> >
> > Hmm... So, if we are in a discipline that uses journals, free access is
> > o.k.;
> > free access to the raw thesis is also o.k.; but if the discipline is one
> > that
> > has the tradition of a book based on the thesis, then free access is not
> > o.k.
> > What do others think of this line of argument?
> >
> > Fytton.
> >
> > Fytton Rowland, Dept of Information Science, Loughborough University, UK.
> >
> > Quoting Thomas Krichel <krichel_at_OPENLIB.ORG>:
> > > M. Meier writes
> > >
> > > > An exposé is availabel under
> > > > http://www.ep.uni-muenchen.de/themen.htm.
> > >
> > > The
> > >
> > > > book as a whole will unfortunately not be available online for free.
> > >
> > > I understand that the book is Michael's PhD thesis. I think that
> > > it would be interesting to understand the reasons why it is not
> > > freely available online. If the FOS movement can not convince
> > > scholars in scholarly communication to make their work freely available
> > > online, we do have a problem. I would like to understand what the
> > > problem is here.
> > >
> > > Cheers,
> > >
> > > Thomas Krichel
> > > mailto:krichel_at_openlib.org
> > >
> > > http://openlib.org/home/krichel
> > >
> > > RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Received on Tue Jul 23 2002 - 13:07:17 BST

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