Academics are divided about the use of the web for (re-)publishing findings and articles they’ve authored in peer-reviewed journals on their own websites. Some are open and free about it, distributing their raw and analysed results online pre- and post- publication, while others are concerned with information ownership issues and fear that their work will be mis-represented or devalued if released online. May 2008’s Scientific American has an excellent summary of the issues.
I’ve struggled with this issue myself, and have I openly asked for advice on whether I should or should not publish the entirety of my PhD thesis on the Web, as other academic colleagues have done (danah, for example). It’s a topic that has been discussed elsewhere. britbohlinger wrote up a summary of a workshop at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference in 2008.
In response to my post, some people voiced their own concerns. As David said,
I would like to turn my thesis into a book and I fear that if I made part or all of it available now publishers would not accept it. Not fair but that seems to be the way things are going.
Jeremy was more cautious. He recommended,
give it away after it is published, not before, especially when starting the career.
Both David and Jeremy have only published the titles and abstracts of their dissertations on their websites.
Yet it seems that there’s a reason to publish research online: simply, it’s cited more. A recent article titled Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research, in the peer-reviewed Computers and Society by Yassine Gargouri, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras, Les Carr, Tim Brody, Stevan Harnad has found that self-archivists “are cited significantly more than articles accessible only to subscribers.” From the abstract:
Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them online are cited significantly more than articles accessible only to subscribers. Some have suggested that this “OA Advantage” may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in 1,984 journals. The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and greatest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations). The advantage is greater for the more citeable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only.
You can get a copy of the full submitted article here, under a Creative Commons license.
I guess this is a long way of saying my decision is, in short, that I will be publishing the whole thing online once the hard-bound copies are in the hands of the appropriates at the University of Surrey next Friday. After that, I know I’ll graduate in 2010. Until then, you can get the full text of the Introduction and the intros to the Literature Review, Study 1, Study 2, Study 3 and the Discussion chapters.
Comments
Thanks for the trackback, Aleks. Good to see the discussion being taken further. The publishing dilemma is also marked by a cultural component, it seems to me. Academics in some European nations do not even consider the move towards making their thesis available other than in a conventional format – any many of them have good reasons to do so. I believe resorting to a model based on what has become the temporary standard on Amazon for instance (look inside-feature with access to the index, glossary and selected pages/chapters) could be a way out of the binary either/or dilemma.
It would help others to make informed decision as to whether they want to request/purchase the complete thesis. Those who can’t afford it or are interested in the summary/abstract for it touches their work only marginally it will be a way to ensure authors are being quoted widely. Having said that, making the entire thesis available remains a fantastic way to crowd-source ideas, criticism and follow-up research and establish trust and connectivity. I believe we often underestimate this crucial aspect – just as much as seem to understimate the amount of confidence being conveyed to others when we share and subsequently encourage them to share, too. In this sense, glad to see you decided to make it available. All the best.
I’ve come across a couple of PhD theses from Delft which are actually presented as (very attractive) books, e.g. Pieter Desmet’s ‘Designing Emotions’ right from the start, with ISBNs – I’m not sure if this a requirement of the degree, but it seems particularly appealing.
Some universities (including mine, Brunel) now require online open-access PDF archiving of all PhD and MPhil theses, unless there’s some commercial sensitivity. That’s certainly affected how I’ve planned the structure and presentation, since I know there’s potentially going to be a lot more scrutiny for years afterwards, versus something that few people read once it’s been submitted.
Much of the reason behind Gargouri et al’s findings is, I think, just the hassle factor of not being able to get immediate access to certain articles, so resolving to look at them “at some point when I’ve got Athens access”, versus being able to read the thing immediately you come across it. I know from my own laziness / satisficing / whatever you want to call it that very often, those paywalled articles just never get read if I can’t get quick, easy access, because there’s always something else more important to do.
There’s also the benefit of doing work in a field where most people who are interested in reading it will also want to read it online, know how to find it, and where you can present it and link to it via your own website. I managed to get the highest number of downloads for any document to date on Brunel’s repository website, by linking directly to the PDF from my blog (and I’m sure most people clicking on the link weren’t academics at all).
Look forward to reading your thesis when it’s online!
Things have moved on a bit since we last spoke, Aleks. My recent enquiries to journal publishers and academic publishers suggest that publishers are, in fact, happy for theses to be more widely accessible, because they recognise that theses and journal articles or book chapters are significantly different products. My thesis, ‘As if nobody’s reading’?: Imagined contexts and socio-technical biases in personal blogging practice in the UK is one of the first to be published in the LSE’s document repository here: http://bit.ly/8MBZBT and is (to the best of my knowledge) the first LSE thesis to be published using a creative commons (BY-NC) – something that required a certain amount of prodding of the relevant degree-granting authorities.
I think you’re right Aleks, that it puts more pressure on the outcome (which might distract from the actual process), but I convince myself that planning every part of the research with a view to being able to explain it to a wider audience is, in itself, a useful kind of academic training. But we’ll have to see when the thing’s actually written up and submitted…
It’s my belief that the lack of web access to PhDs is a real let down to the academic community. One particular MIT thesis which I accessed from their Dspace was incredibly influential on my own work. It struck me that there may be so many theses that are in no way searchable which may contain vast quantities of material that has never been published but extremely useful. In fact I only reached the thesis I refer to through citation from another paper – I wouldn’t have been able to just search it out by keyword. I think that, ideally, not only should theses be published, but some search engine should exist like Web of Knowledge to search them out. I’m doing an engineering degree, so it’s not as common to just publish an entire thesis, and thus perhaps the commercial issues are not quite as compelling, but i certainly feel that online article publishing and indexing has made my research more informed and the same process for PhD theses would be just as beneficial.
Hi,
Congratulations on the award of your Ph.D. and on the success of “The Virtual Revolution.” As a librarian currently involved in setting up an institutional repository at my own university, can I ask if you have any plans to deposit your own thesis in Surrey Scholarship Online? I’m sure they would be happy to receive it.