Are you a science graduate student worried that making your thesis or dissertation available online will hurt your chances of getting it published? Gail McMillan, director of the digital library and archives at Virginia Tech, has good news for you. In a recent survey of science-journal editors, 87 percent indicated they would consider articles drawn from openly accessible electronic theses and dissertations, or ETD’s.
Ms. McMillan helped run the survey under the auspices of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, a group that promotes the use and preservation of ETD’s. She presented the survey results here this week at the fall meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information.
The 2012 survey is a companion to one last year that polled journal editors in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. According to the 2011 results, more than 82 percent of the journal editors would consider manuscripts revised from openly accessible ETD’s. (The 2011 survey also included university-press directors, who were more ambivalent about ETD’s. More than half—53.7 percent—said they welcomed ETD submissions or would weigh them on a case-by-case basis.)
Electronic theses and dissertations are not a new animal. In 1997, Virginia Tech began requiring students to submit their theses and dissertations in electronic form, according to Ms. McMillan. Since then, ETD policies have become the norm, although access levels vary. Students can ask that their work be embargoed—kept in a dark repository, out of the public eye—for a specified period of time. But open access is more and more the default.
Many students and their faculty advisers, however, cling to the idea that publishers will balk at publishing work if it’s already freely available online. Ms. McMillan has found that those fears cut across disciplinary lines. Decisions about whether to restrict access to electronic work tend to be driven by anecdote, she said, and faculty members tend to play it safe when dispensing career advice.
“I think faculty want to err on the side of caution,” she said. “I wish they would look at the data.”
Getting the Data
To get the data for the 2012 survey, Ms. McMillan and colleagues began with Thomson Reuters’s Journal Performance Indicators from 2005 to 2009. They used impact factors to identify the top five journals in each of the science categories, then invited 290 editors to take part. About 28 percent, or 81 editors, accepted the invitation.
Respondents were asked to choose from six answers to a question about their policies regarding manuscripts taken from an electronic thesis or dissertation. The six options included: “always welcome for submission,” “considered on a case-by-case basis,” considered if the contents are substantially revised or if access to the ETD is limited to the home institution, and “not considered under any circumstances.”
By far the largest share of editors—55 percent—said manuscripts based on ETD’s were always welcome. “Work which has not been published in archival peer-reviewed journals is considered appropriate for submission, even if it is accessible elsewhere,” one journal editor noted. Another described ETD’s as “legitimate and citable” works that are still fair game for journal publication because they haven’t yet gone through external peer review and haven’t been published “in a recognized peer-reviewed outlet.”
A handful of editors said they had not yet had to deal with ETD’s. Only 13 percent picked the always-say-never approach. Two percent said they’d consider manuscripts only from limited-access ETD’s; 9 percent insisted that manuscripts be substantially different from the ETD’s; 21 percent went with a case-by-case approach.
The results of the 2012 survey have not yet been published. The results of the 2011 survey are available in an article, “Do Open-Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities?,” forthcoming in the journal College & Research Libraries and available now as a preprint.
Ms. McMillan is a co-author of that article, which was written with Marisa L. Ramirez, the digital-repository librarian at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, and several other academic librarians.
