IR deposits and publishers

[Sarah Dick]

Hello,

I'm curious if others have policies or general advice given to students about the following situation: depositing their thesis/dissertation into the institutional repository--all in good faith--only to find that a publisher refuses to publish an article or book based upon the t/d, stating the work has already been published.  The publisher always states it is materials found within the IR not from ProQuest ETD.

This is essentially a charge of self-plagiarism.

Do you suggest students who intend to publish embargo their work for x-years?  If that is a 'solution', we wonder how many years would be advisable. 
We do require students obtain copyright permission for materials either published and/or in submission process prior to finalizing the t/d.

Thanks for any thoughts,
Sarah

[Eberhard R. Hilf]

could you give a real example? what did which publisher write?

[Sherry Lake]

We get this question quite often. At the University of Virginia, depositing thesis/dissertations (that are graduating/degree related - as apposed to course related) to our IR is a requirement and NOT an option. Uploading to ProQuest is optional, and I am not sure is even suggested by the departments any more. We do allow embargoes for (6 months, 1 year, 2 years & max - 5 years). Though all non-Engineering ETDs in our repository are available if viewed on our campus infrastructure (IP authenticated). Information on our ETDs can be found here: http://www.library.virginia.edu/libra/etds/ 

Here is our canned response to those asking if depositing in an IR is considered "prior-publishing":

Other scholars have expressed concern about how publishers view online availability of dissertations prior to their publication in other forms, and there are a couple of studies worth examining before concluding that all publishers reject book ideas coming out of dissertations which have been available online. It is also highly advisable to review the specific policies of the publishers to whom you are considering submitting your proposal, as there can be significant variations. Our colleague Gail McMillan at Virginia Tech has researched this issue extensively, you may wish to read her scholarship which indicates a large proportion of publishers do not consider online availability of dissertations and impediment to further publishing, I especially recommend the 2013 article she co-authored, the abstract of which follows:

Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities? Findings from a 2011 Survey of Academic Publishers  http://crl.acrl.org/content/74/4/368

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.

I hope the above is helpful. Do let us know if you have further questions.

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[Anton Angelo]

Kia ora koutou,

 

There are so many factors influencing this: it makes it one of the most interesting parts of looking after ETDs.

 

Delurk: I work at the University of Canterbury, a mid-sized research and teaching University in the South Island of New Zealand.  We have about 200-300 ETDs a year, only held electronically, and about 7,500 held in our institutional repository dating from 1914.

 

Firstly I’d recommend the following:

 

Cirasella, J., & Thistlethwaite, P. (2017). Open access and the graduate author: A dissertation anxiety manual. In K. L. Smith & K. A. Dickson (Eds.), Open access and the future of scholarly communication: Implementation (pp. 203-224). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. (Preprint at http://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_pubs/286/ )

 

I use the McMillan articles as well, when I’m asked for advice which are excellent.

 

I suspect the issue comes not from the student’s potential not to be published, but the supervisor’s.

 

Most of these articles will have the supervisor as second author, and some institutions demand up to four (4) submitted articles from each PhD candidate (though not mine).  That’s a useful volume of publishing coming from no more (or not much more) work than normal PhD supervision.  I’ve politely questioned a number of supervisors on their requests to embargo students ETDs and the response has been not that publishers will disregard papers, but that they can.  Not that there is evidence that they will, but they might.

 

My response is to start a programme of taking ETDs more seriously that they have been in the past.  Being so available means they are having more impact on the scholarly discourse than they have had previously.  To test that I’ve been doing some bibliometric analysis of the citation rates of NZ theses in Scopus (paper forthcoming, where should I submit it?) and I can see a massive upswing in citations of ETDs.

 

My next step is to get DOIs for ETDs so we can trace them more effectively.  (Thanks to the previous discussions on this list about that).

 

The aim is to accept that ETDs are an important contribution to knowledge in their own right – and that they are not some lesser thing that needs hidden away, where the papers are the ‘real’ research.

 

Anton.

 

 

--

Anton Angelo

Research Data Co-ordinator

University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.

 

James Hight Building, 519, Level 5

Ph +64 3 369 3853 (x93853)

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[Brian Minihan]

Hello,

 

This is the most common query I get as ETD coordinator at Hong Kong Baptist University.

 

Like others have mentioned, I often refer people to Gail McMillan’s works.

 

There are also two excellent libguides from MIT Library & Cal Tech’s Library, which feature fairly comprehensive lists of major publishers and their policies of whether ETDs are “prior publications”

 

http://libguides.caltech.edu/publisherpolicies

 

https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/theses-copyright/theses-and-article-publishing/

 

In my experience, I have personally contacted publishers Elsevier and Taylor & Francis, who mostly do not consider OA ETDs prior publications.

 

However, Cambridge Scholars Publishing did respond to me that they do consider submissions from an OA ETD as a prior publication. But there is a significant amount of debate about the quality and reputation of Cambridge Scholars (not to be confused with Cambridge University Press). I advised this candidate/author to seriously consider this factor in their manuscript submission to this publisher, before finally extending the embargo.

 

I found about 36% of thesis advisors at my institution felt having an open access ETD may present challenges for a post-grad’s academic publishing opportunities. This is significant because I feel a lot of PhD candidates receive publishing/scholarly communication advice from their advisors.

 

Best wishes,

 

Brian Minihan

Scholarly Communications Librarian

Digital & Multimedia Services

Hong Kong Baptist University Library

(852) 3411 8037

min...@hkbu.edu.hk

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