Google publishes Stanford dissertations online
John Wildermuth, Special to The Chronicle
Monday, November 16, 2009
Stanford doctoral students will now be able to post their dissertations on Google as the university replaces the traditional bound volumes of acid-free paper with e-files of scholarly work.
Beginning last week, students who used to lug three or four copies of their capstone university work to Stanford’s registrar’s office could file their dissertations by simply uploading them from their computer.
“It doesn’t make sense anymore that the final medium for scholarship should still be paper,” said university Registrar Tom Black, one of the administrators behind the change.
The switch, which began last Monday, will affect the more than 600 doctoral dissertations filed each year at Stanford. Plans already are being made to extend the electronic effort to thousands of master’s theses and honors papers.
The key to the effort is the university’s partnership with Google, which will allow anyone with a computer to access the work of Stanford doctoral students.
“We have way north of 35,000 bound dissertations on our shelves,” said university Librarian Michael Keller, who has been pushing for the digital dissertations. “Many of them just stay on the shelf, forgotten and invisible, or scholars have to pay enormous sums to come to Stanford to read them.”
The Google link “will allow our students’ work to be seen more readily,” Keller added. “It may also help a student get identified online as an expert in a certain subject, which could help in the promotion of a young career.”
While other universities already allow electronic submissions, “we’re the only one we know of that’s going the whole route, with approval online and then sending it down the electronic pipe,” Keller said.
Until now, Stanford has used ProQuest, which has been in the academic publication business since the days of microfilm, to make its dissertations available to the scholarly community.
More creative freedom
But using the company costs money, which meant that students would end up paying as much as $221 in fees when they filed their dissertations with the registrar’s office. Stanford’s electronic filing system will be free, although students still can pay to have their dissertations listed on ProQuest, an online subscription service for dissertations and other academic publications.
The new system will give students more freedom to be creative in producing their work, Keller said, because electronic documents allow easier use of spreadsheets and graphics, as well as hot links to pictures, citations and other online resources.
There’s something in it for the university, also. Typically, students would have to print out their dissertations on pricey, acid-free, library stock paper, with two copies for the university library, another for ProQuest and yet another for their academic department. The staff in the Registrar’s Office would then have to go over each dissertation by hand before sending it out for binding, even measuring the margins to make sure the submissions met the exacting rules for publication.
“This is more convenient, more affordable and offers the students more choices,” because they can still go the traditional route if they prefer, Black said.
While the new program cost Stanford less than $50,000 to set up, there were plenty of academic questions that had to be answered.
Some balked at first
While the chance to put their work online for public viewing was enthusiastically endorsed by students in the sciences, there were more concerns from the humanities students, said Richard Roberts, a history professor who chairs the university’s committee on graduate studies.
“Science students are used to having their papers published quickly as journal articles,” he said. “But the ‘tenure book’ is very important in the humanities, and students were worried that making their work instantly accessible might affect publishers’ decisions later on.”
The problem was solved by allowing the graduate students to embargo their work for up to five years, to give them time to get it published. They also will be allowed to decide whether to release either 20 or 100 percent of their dissertation to Google.
To students raised in the Internet era, the idea of electronically submitting their work and then seeing it posted for all the world to see is a no-brainer.
“There’s something satisfying about holding a physical copy of the product of seven or eight years of college work,” said Greg Roberts of Concord, a mechanical engineering student studying in Stanford’s Graduate Community Center. “But this just makes a lot of sense.”
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/16/BA721AK4NV.DTL
This article appeared on page C – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
