ResourceBlog Article: Google Makes Stanford Dissertations Searchable

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Wednesday, 18th November 2009

Google Makes Stanford Dissertations Searchable

What does this mean for ProQuest in the long term?

From the Article:

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.

[Snip]

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."

[Snip]

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.

[Snip]

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.

[Snip]

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.

Source: SF Chronicle

Hat Tip: Library Stuff

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