Still thinking about this PhD in anthropology I saw selling access to their dissertation on Instagram claiming that the University had "embargoed it" because it was "too radical and controversial." When in fact it's just a default policy for literally every dissertation (usually to protect the authors who want to publish or patent) before they're made public by default.
That person missed their calling in marketing truly
@grimalkina
I found this so strange when I discovered it seemed to be common practice in some fields in the US.
Like, it's one thing if your thesis is about optimising the size of nuclear warheads, but not uploading a thesis about oil prices influence on international relations just seems wrong.
Though I suppose in the US it's much more common than you self-fund your PhD studies so it makes some amount of sense the thesis is proprietary until you've had a chance to monetise it for a decade or so.
@tobychev it's not the case that in the us PhDs are self funded on average? We have by far the most PhD funding in many areas of science relative to most other countries afaik?
@tobychev also this was actually a Canadian dissertation
@grimalkina
As I learned to my disadvantage just now, I actually have no idea of how PhD students are funded in most of the world, so I don't know how it being a Canadian dissertation affects the argument.
But regardless of the actual funding situation, I still find it strange that publishing the dissertation online isn't immediately required once it's been approved. So if US students are mostly funded by government money, that proprietary period is just more strange!
@tobychev many are released publicly but some universities embargo by default (which you could probably change if you wanted to) because it blocks co publishing pieces of the dissertation, which many people want to do. A little bit more about the rights holder (like being able to publish a book with a traditional publisher) than blocking access.
@grimalkina
Why would it block reusing your own material? Does the university get the copyright to the dissertation or something?
@tobychev
I'm not an expert in this but it's my understanding that some publishers consider content in an open access dissertation to count as "prior publication" yes
https://grad.unm.edu/degree-completion/thesis-dissertations/thesisdissert-embargo.html