This section looks at how electronic publication
of theses and dissertations will enhance graduate education. Topics discussed include:
improved knowledge of electronic publication technologies, greater access to
scholarly information, wider distribution of an author's work, and student and
faculty concerns.
The move by Graduate Schools to allow or even require students to submit theses and dissertations as electronic or digital documents (ETDs) creates much excitement, both positive and negative, among the students and faculty who will be affected by this initiative to digitize these important documents. These positive and negative views will no doubt be tempered by increased knowledge of the ETD process and through increased experience in creating and archiving ETDs. At this time in the development of the ETD process, I believe the importance of an open-minded approach to this new way of expressing the outcomes of masters and doctoral research is captured very well in the following statement by Jean-Claude Guédon in his work, Publications électroniques (1998):
When print emerged,
universities failed to recognize its importance and almost managed to
marginalize themselves into oblivion.
With a new major transition upon us, such benign neglect simply will not
do. Yet the challenges universities
face in responding to an increasingly digitized and networked world are
staggering. Universities need a vision
allowing them to express their dearest values in new forms, rather than protect
their present form at the expense of their most fundamental values.
The ETD initiatives now under way in universities around
the world are about bringing fundamental change to our current concept of what
constitutes a thesis or a dissertation. In the U.S., this concept has not
changed significantly since students first began to submit paper theses and
dissertations in our first research universities over 120 years ago. By moving
from a paper presentation of research results to a digital presentation, we
make available to the ETD author a powerful array of presentation and
distribution tools. These tools allow the author to reveal to masters and
doctoral committees, to other scholars, and to the world, the results of their
research endeavors in ways and with a level of access never before possible.
I believe graduate
schools and faculty, in the name of maintaining quality, have all too often inhibited
the creativity of graduate students by forcing them into a mold to which they
must all conform. This is nowhere more evident than in the thesis or
dissertation where format restrictions abound. Some graduate schools have
special paper with printed margins within which all written material must be
contained. Some graduate schools still read and edit the entire text of every
thesis or dissertation. Many have thesis or dissertation editors whose
reputation for using fine rulers and other editorial devices for enforcing
graduate school format are legendary.
I believe that the
student must submit a high quality document that is legible, readable, and that
conveys the results of the research or scholarship in a manner that is clear
and informative to other scholars. The document does not, however, need to be
narrowly confined to a specific format if it meets the above criteria. To
create a high quality ETD students must be information literate. That is, they
must, at a minimum, have a level of knowledge of office software that will
allow them to create a document that if printed would result in a high quality
paper document. This kind of properly formatted digital document thus becomes
the primary construct of the author, rather than a paper document. In
conducting training workshops for Virginia Tech students, a number of which are
older non-traditional students, we have found that this lack of office software
skills is the single greatest impediment to their being able to produce a good
"vanilla" ETD—that is, an ETD that has the appearance of a paper ETD,
but is submitted as a digital document.
As early 1999 about
80% of Virginia Tech's 1500 ETDs are vanilla ETDs. Accordingly, we have
emphasized the development of these skills, which number less than ten and can
be taught in an hour, in our student ETD workshops. Once the student has the
fundamental skills to produce an ETD, they are ready, if they desire, to move
on to more advanced topics for producing a visually and audibly enhanced ETD.
Advanced topics include landscape pages; multimedia objects like graphs,
pictures, sound, movies, simulations; and reader aids like internal and
external links, thumbnail pages, and text notes. Students are not required to
use these enhancement tools, but by giving them access to these tools we open
creative opportunities for students to more clearly express the outcomes of
their masters or doctoral research.
To maintain quality,
the student's thesis or dissertation committee must actively participate as
reviewers in this process and must be prepared to exercise judgment concerning
the suitability of material for inclusion in the ETD. The resulting
"chocolate ripple" or in some cases "macadamia nut fudge"
ETDs are the forerunners of a new genre of theses and dissertations which will
become commonplace in the future.
Whether tomorrow's
graduate students are employed inside or outside the university environment,
the ubiquitous presence and use of digital information will certainly be a
major part of their future careers. For this reason efforts to increase the
information literacy are certain to benefit graduate students long after they
have used these skills to produce a thesis or a dissertation.
The traditional view
is that the doctoral dissertation and less so the masters thesis provides a one
time opportunity for the student to do an in depth study of an area of research
or scholarship and to write at length about the topic, free of the restrictions
on length imposed by book and journal editors. Such writings may contain
extensive literature reviews and lengthy bibliographies. They may also contain
results of preliminary studies or discussions of future research directions
that would be very valuable to the researchers and scholars who follow.
Primarily because of restrictions on the length of journal articles, such
information exists only in theses and dissertations. I believe this view is
correct and should be maintained in the digital thesis or dissertation.
The attitudes of students and faculty toward
the value of theses and dissertations vary greatly. For the reasons given above
some value them highly. Others, particularly some faculty, see them as
requirements of graduate schools that have little value. These individuals
consider the journal publication the primary outcome of graduate student
research. I do not dispute the added value of the peer review process for
journal articles and for books, yet I do firmly believe that so long as the
scholar or researcher using ETDs as information sources recognizes theses and
dissertations for what they are, these documents are valuable sources of
information.
Indeed, these
information sources have been grossly underutilized because of the difficulty
in obtaining widely available, free access to them either through university
libraries or through organizations like University Microfilms. If a comprehensive worldwide networked
digital library of theses and dissertations existed, I believe the impact and
utilization of these sources of information would rise in proportion to the
increased access. This view is supported by experience at Virginia Tech in our
ETD project. Research done in 1996 by the Virginia Tech library showed that the
average thesis circulated about twice a year and the average dissertation about
three times a year in the first four years they were in the library. These
usage statistics do not include the use of copies housed in the home
departments of the students or the usage of dissertations in the University
Microfilms collection. Even so, the usage of the 1500 ETDs in our digital
library far outpaces the use of paper documents.
Growth in usage has
been steady and remarkable. For the calendar year 1998 there were over 350,000
downloads of the PDF files of the 1500 ETDs that were in the VT library. This
is over 200 downloads for each ETD in the collection. The distribution of the
interest in the ETDs is equally remarkable. The majority of the interest comes
from the U.S with inquiries in 1998 coming from the following domains: 250,000
from .edu, 88,000 from .com, 27,000 from .net, 6,800 from .gov, and 3400
from.mil. Inquiries also come from countries around the world including the
8,100 from the United Kingdom, 4,200 from Australia, 7,300 from Germany, 3,900
from Canada, and 2,200 from South Korea.
The most accessed ETDs have been accessed tens of thousands of times
with many over one thousand accesses. To learn more about accesses see http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/data/somefacts.html
When the ETD project
began at Virginia Tech, some students and faculty expressed great concern that
publishers would not accept derivative manuscripts or book manuscripts from
ETDs. For some publishers this concern is legitimate and the ETD project has
put into place a system for students and advisors to restrict access to ETDs
until after journal articles appear. This system seems to satisfy faculty,
students and publishers. Publishers that have discussed this matter with us
usually have not expressed concern with the release of the ETD after the
journal article is published. One exception may be small scholarly presses that
publish books derived from ETDs. These presses view the book as having a sales
life of several years after the initial date of publication. In these cases, it
may be necessary to extend the period of restricted access well beyond the
publication date of the book.
For the longer term,
however, it is important that researchers and scholars regain control of their
work by becoming more knowledgeable about their rights as original creators and
as holders of the copyrights to the work. This requires universities to have
active programs to educate their faculty and students about copyright.
Publishers also need to be educated to be less concerned about ETDs interfering
with the marketability of their journals. This can be done, in part, by an
effort on the part of researchers and scholars to educate publishers of their
professional journals. They need to help persuade journal editors that ETDs
most often are not the same as the journal articles derived from them, and that
there is a serious difference because they have not been subject to the stamp
of approval that is the result of peer review. As such they should not be
considered a threat to the news value or to the sales potential of the journal.
It is interesting to note that a Virginia Tech survey of students who had
released their ETDs worldwide showed that twenty students had published
derivative manuscripts from the ETDs with no publisher resistance to accepting
the manuscripts.
It is also noteworthy
that the American Physical Society has a practice of sharing electronic copies
of preprints of manuscripts undergoing peer review (http://xxx.lanl.gov/). Those that successfully pass peer review are
published in the Society's journals. This practice is essentially the same as
the practice being proposed for ETDs above.
The risk of plagiarism
is next on the list of concerns of students and faculty. We do not yet have
enough experience with ETDs to speak authoritatively about this issue. If one
thinks a bit about it though, it seems that the risks of exposure of plagiarism
will deter such activity. Most
researchers and scholars still work in fields where a fairly small group of
workers have detailed knowledge of their work. It follows that because of the
size of the field and because of the ease of detecting plagiarized passages in
electronic documents, the risks of detection will make wide spread plagiarism
unlikely.
More disconcerting to
me is the closely related concern of researchers and scholars that by reading
their students ETDs, other researchers and scholars will achieve a competitive
edge in the contest for grants and contracts. Most research in U.S.
universities is done in the name of supporting the well being of the nation and
is being sponsored directly or indirectly with public tax dollars. There is something wrong with a view that
research and scholarship should not be shared among other researchers and
scholars for the above reasons. Yet the concern is understandable in today's
financially stretched research universities where the competition for promotion
and tenure among young faculty is fierce. Similarly, faculty are encouraged to
develop intellectual property in which the university claims a share. I'm not
sure if we have gone too far down this road, but I am concerned that our
obligation as scholars to make our work known to other scholars is being
compromised. A result of this compromise is that the goal of scholars to
advance knowledge through sharing knowledge may also be slowed.
ETD discussions with
the Graduate Dean, the Library, and Ed Fox, a faculty member conducting
research on digital libraries, began in 1991. At that time we were exploring
the possibilities of optional submission. Shortly thereafter Adobe AcrobatÒ software for creating and editing Portable
Document Format (PDF) files came on the market. This software for the first
time provided a tool that was easy to use and allowed documents to be moved
between computer operating systems and platforms while retaining the original
document formatting. This was a great step forward in increasing worldwide
access to information while retaining the original author's formatting style.
At this time we began a pilot study to determine if the AcrobatÒ met our needs. We determined rather quickly that
it was the most suitable product for our needs at that time. In my opinion that
conclusion holds true today.
We continued discussions
with the Graduate School and the Library and in the Fall of 1995 concluded that
we would seek to make the submission of ETDs a requirement of the Graduate
School. We took a proposal to the Commission on Graduate Studies and Policies
for discussion. A degree standards subcommittee discussed the proposal amongst
themselves then with ETD team members, Ed Fox from Computer Science, Gail
McMillan from the Library, and John Eaton from the Graduate School. In these
discussions the expressed concerns dealt with archiving and preservation, the
burden to the students and the burden to the faculty and departments. After
full discussion, the subcommittee recommended approval of the proposal. The
commission discussed and approved the proposal, subject to the following
provisions.
n That a student training process be conducted to show students how to produce an ETD.
n That necessary software (Adobe AcrobatÒ) be made available to students in campus computer labs.
n That the faculty not be burdened by this process.
n
That a faculty/graduate student advisory committee be
established to advise the Commission on
Graduate Studies and Policies on the ETD project.
With these provisions
agreed to, the Commission approved a one year voluntary submission period to be
used for beginning the student ETD workshops, informing the university
community, and development of the infrastructure needed to move to requiring
ETDs, after which ETDs would become a requirement in the spring semester of
1997. All went very smoothly while the process was voluntary. Workshops were
started, software was placed in campus computer labs, visits were made to
departments, articles were published in the campus newspaper, and the advisory
committee was formed.
Late in the spring
semester of 1997, after the mandatory requirement began, a small but vocal
group of faculty, mostly from the life sciences and chemistry expressed a
serious concerns about compromising the publication of derivative manuscripts
from ETDs made available world wide. While we had a provision for withholding
release of ETDs pending publication of manuscripts, the time period of six
months was thought to be short. The ETD
team responded to this concern by giving the student and the advisor greater
control of the access to the ETD through the ETD approval form which can be
found at
http://etd.vt.edu/. The modifications made to the ETD approval
form seem to have satisfied faculty concerns about publication, and since that
date the ETD project has operated very smoothly at Virginia Tech and is now
rapidly becoming and integral part of graduate education.
The ETD project has provided the opportunity
for fundamental change in the expression of and access to the results and
scholarship done by students in research universities around the world. These
tools also can easily be extended to the expression of and access to research
done by faculty. As scholars, we should not let this opportunity slip by. As Jean-Claude
Guédon said "Benign neglect simply will not do".