[BOAI] Re: Survey into electronic theses - open access soon to be commonplace

[Stevan Harnad]

On 2012-02-23, at 6:52 AM, John Collier wrote:

> My PhD thesis (1984) was available on line soon after it was finished. In 1986 an applicant for admission to graduate studies at Rice University, where I was at the time, submitted a paper that plagiarized in substantial part a chapter of my thesis. So this does happen.

Since then, the (computational) means of detecting plagiarism have also become much better, and will become better still as more of the scholarly corpus becomes openly accessible online. (I would add that since OA is one of the best ways to assert and clock priority, most of plagiarism will become a victimless crime -- or at least the victim will not be the plagiarized paper's author but the plagiarist's institution. OA is a great way to name and shame plagiarists too, so it will become a deterrent...

As far as I can tell, the only real deterrent to making theses OA is the possibility that it diminishes the prospect of publishing them as a book. This too will change, as OA -- including OA book publishing -- grows. There will always be that tiny fraction of theses, though, that has (or thinks it has) the possibility of becoming a best-selling block-buster, and there the thesis authors should really be allowed the option of Closed Access deposit (ID/OA along with the email-eprint-request Button) instead of mandatory OA.

Stevan Harnad