Today, Mr. Hattem, 38, is a graduate student at Yale working on a dissertation in American history that “explores the role of competing historical memories of 17th-century Britain in shaping late colonial political culture.”
He told his exceptional story to help explain why he came to the defense of the American Historical Association last week when it issued a statement calling on universities to allow newly minted Ph.D’s to “embargo” their dissertations for up to six years — that is, keep them from being circulated online.
Though policies vary from university to university, the practice increasingly is to require that dissertations be filed electronically upon acceptance and to provide them to anyone with access to a university’s online collection.
The statement, which appeared to come out of the blue, caused more than a few double-takes. Don’t historians want their research to be immediately shared, stimulating arguments and, ideally, new research that either refutes or reinforces those arguments? And why would someone work years to produce a dissertation and then insist that it not be seen for as many as six more years? Academics almost by definition are delayed-gratification specialists, but still.
“Ideally, I would want all of our work freely available,” Mr. Hattem said in a telephone interview, “but we have to deal with the way things are.”
And the way things are, he said, is that university presses are known to be skeptical about agreeing to publish a book when the Ph.D dissertation it is based on is readily available online.
“If you want tenure at a university, you have to publish a book,” he said. “It’s professional currency.”
This term, “embargo” — so common in how journalism doles out information in the digital age — perhaps is evidence that some academics are learning from journalists: readers simply have less interest in old news, even old news about the British colonies.
The historical association, which is based in Washington and has 14,000 members, including high school teachers, government historians and university professors, was inspired to act, officials said, because of simmering concerns that institutions were moving to require that students’ work be shared freely.
“I have heard from junior scholars, newly minted Ph.D’s, I have heard from my colleagues who are mentors to these younger scholars, from university press acquisition editors, who say ‘we are very happy you released this statement,’ ” said Jacqueline Jones, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who is the vice president of the professional division at the historical association.
Critics of the embargo argue that knowledge should circulate freely on the Internet. In this case, they say that if incentives in academic hiring discourage such sharing, then the American Historical Association should agitate to change those incentives, not promote the idea of embargoes.
“The idea of locking up ideas for six years is not right,” said Heather Joseph, the executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, which favors open research. “The thing that bothered us the most is that it was a one-dimensional response to a multidimensional issue, and a missed opportunity.”
The association has tried to frame the issue as giving scholars a choice, while also noting that it has pressed for greater inclusion of digital-based scholarship. Questions and answers published in response to criticism tried to lower the stakes.
“Is the A.H.A. recommending that students embargo their dissertations?” was the first question, and “No” was the first answer, with the explainer, “The A.H.A. is recommending that universities adopt flexible policies that will allow newly minted Ph.D’s to decide for themselves whether or not to embargo their dissertations.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/business/media/historians-seek-a-delay-in-posting-dissertations.html?partner=rss&emc=rss