As many of you wonder about the "outdated" media in which the dissertation
is published, I will give you the obvious explanation: The University of
Munich requires that all Ph.D manuscripts have to be handed in in print form, no
online or CD-ROM version allowed. To recover the printing costs (appr. $ 400),
every Ph.D. candidate tries to find a decent enough publisher to get at
least a small percentage back. My publisher, a newly founded PoD boutique, would
not be very happy if the book appeared as a free document on the www.
Regards
Michael Meier
> This is an interesting point. In some disciplines, there is a tradition
> of
> writing journal articles based on one's PhD research -- some of them
> perhaps
> published before the thesis is written -- while in other fields the
> practice is
> to turn one's thesis into a book. However, the thesis itself, in its
> original
> form as an examination document, is usually made publicly available in the
> library of its home university, and is indexed in various secondary
> services
> such as Dissertation Abstracts. If universities in future mostly have
> OAI-
> compliant servers, and theses are submitted in electronic as well as
> printed
> form, there seems to be no obstacle to each university mounting its own
> theses
> on its server for free worldwide access.
>
> But... Stevan often makes the point that his concern is purely with the
> scholarly journal literature, which is given away by its authors, and
> which
> should be avialable free of charge to other scholars. He goes on to say
> that
> this argument does not apply to other kinds of publication for which
> authors
> are traditionally paid, which is the case with books, even scholarly
> books. On
> that argument, having to pay 30 Euros for Meier's book is o.k.
>
> Hmm... So, if we are in a discipline that uses journals, free access is
> o.k.;
> free access to the raw thesis is also o.k.; but if the discipline is one
> that
> has the tradition of a book based on the thesis, then free access is not
> o.k.
> What do others think of this line of argument?
>
> Fytton.
>
> Fytton Rowland, Dept of Information Science, Loughborough University, UK.
>
> Quoting Thomas Krichel <krichel_at_OPENLIB.ORG>:
>
> > M. Meier writes
> >
> > > An exposé is availabel under http://www.ep.uni-muenchen.de/themen.htm.
> > The
> > > book as a whole will unfortunately not be available online for free.
> >
> > I understand that the book is Michael's PhD thesis. I think that
> > it would be interesting to understand the reasons why it is not
> > freely available online. If the FOS movement can not convince scholars
> > in scholarly communication to make their work freely available online,
> > we do have a problem. I would like to understand what the problem is
> > here.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Thomas Krichel
> > mailto:krichel_at_openlib.org
> >
> > http://openlib.org/home/krichel
> >
> > RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
> >
> >
>
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Received on Fri Jul 19 2002 - 09:42:11 BST