As part of our OA Week 2024 celebrations, we hosted a discussion on October 23rd about various open access topics. I’ll be recapping those discussions here on the OA blog.
First up – embargoing electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs)
For a little context: at UT Austin, all masters and PhD students are required to share their ETDs on Texas ScholarWorks. Students may request an embargo of up to 7 years before the work becomes public. Most institutions now have requirements for public sharing of theses and dissertations, but time frames available for embargoes vary from institution to institution.
Our group discussed some of the advantages to sharing your work immediately upon graduation:
- You can claim priority on your intellectual argument by having your work time stamped with the date of submission.
- You can start generating citations to your work immediately.
- If you plan on publishing a book based on your ETD, it will be very different from the thesis. It’s unlikely the thesis will substitute for the book. Note – see two Ramirez citations below for more information on publishing work based on an ETD.
- You don’t have to respond to requests for access if your thesis is already online.
- At UT, embargoed works remain in the submission system, Vireo, until the embargo expires. That means they are basically invisible to anyone except the Vireo administrators. That makes it both difficult for other scholars to understand the state of research, but also makes it difficult for graduates to point to a record of their work.
We also discussed some reasons why people might want to put an embargo on their ETD:
- If they are applying for a patent, the work needs to stay unpublished until that process is completed.
- If the work is a creative work like a novel that will be published with few edits, then embargoes may be necessary.
- There may be an agreement with a third party to not share data or information contained in the ETD for a set period of time.
- When publishing work based on an ETD, a publisher may require an embargo on public access to your ETD. Again, see Ramirez citations for more information.
Our group also discussed the general drop off in submissions from UT Austin to the ProQuest dissertation database. We had some questions about what the process of ProQuest submission looks like now. There were also some questions about whether it might be possible to at least share author, title, abstract, but not the full-text for embargoed works to make them more discoverable.
If you are interested in reading more, here are some selected resources (not comprehensive):
- Rasuli, B., Schöpfel, J., Boock, M. & Van Wyk, B. (2023). Access and impact barriers to academic publications: a global study of thesis and dissertation embargo policies. Online Information Review, 47(6), p. 1208-1222. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-09-2022-0497
- Schöpfel, J., & Prost, H. (2013). Back to Grey: Disclosure and Concealment of Electronic Theses and Dissertations. The Fifteenth International Conference on Grey Literature: The Grey Audit: A Field Assessment in Grey Literature, Bratislava, Slovakia. https://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00944662v1/document
- Ramirez, M.L. et al. (2013). Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities? Findings from a 2011 Survey of Academic Publishers. College & Research Libraries, 74(4), p. 368-380. https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/16317
- Ramirez, M.L. et al. (2014). Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Sciences?. College & Research Libraries, 75(6), p. 808-821. https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/16390.
- McMillan, G. (2016). Electronic Theses and Dissertations: Preparing Graduate Students for Their Futures. In B.B. Callicott, D. Scherer, & A. Wesolek (Eds.), Making Institutional Repositories Work. p. 107-126. Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, Indiana. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wf4drg
