Who Owns a Dissertation, and Why Does It Matter?

Abstract

At my university and probably at yours, PhD dissertations are expected to be original research or creative contributions. After all that original work, PhD candidates assume that they own the intellectual property in these documents. But the university and its library repositories also have an interest in the work, and editors and publishers would like to have an interest as well. How should the dissertation author respond to these competing claims? I can see all sides of this question. I was a PhD student, and currently I am a faculty advisor of PhD students, a university administrator in charge of PhD programs, and an editor who works for a publisher. From these perspectives, I offer these observations to PhD students and their mentors. As a newly-minted PhD, I fully expected that my dissertation would launch my academic career in nursing when published in article form. As an advisor in a school of nursing, I encourage my advisees to establish a track record of publications to start their academic research careers in health sciences, and as a university PhD program administrator, I observe that publishing the thesis or dissertation (I use these words interchangeably) is equally important for students in non-science fields, including arts and letters. In my student days, I had no sense that I could lose the chance to publish my dissertation and further my career in academic nursing, but graduates in some fields may face such a risk. For dissertation authors in the creative fields, such as poetry, fiction, and arts criticism, the advent of electronic repositories at universities and online thesis sales by publishers such as Amazon and ProQuest® has changed the publishing landscape. In a recent column in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Sinor, 2014), an English professor reported that electronic sales of one graduate's thesis, a piece of creative writing, had probably rendered unpublishable the novel he had planned to develop from it to launch his writing career. Sinor warned that most humanities presses would not consider publishing any work that has been posted online in thesis form, whether on ProQuest© or an institutional digital repository, citing a survey of 52 editors, 50 of whom edited poetry journals (Thomas & Shirkey, 2013). More than half of these creative arts editors considered electronic availability of a thesis to be prior publication and therefore would not accept a work for review that had been available electronically in dissertation form. Is this a concern for students and mentors in nursing and health science? Most would say it is not. Universities are working hard to reduce students' anxieties about electronic dissertation archiving, which at many universities is a requirement for the degree. Officials at Duke (Smith, 2013) and Boston College (Morris, 2012) cited a survey of 53 university presses and 75 journal editors in the social sciences and humanities (McMillan, Ramirez, Dalton, Read, & Seamans, 2011), which appears more applicable to our readers than the poetry-focused survey cited by Sinor (2014) above. McMillan and colleagues reported that 72% of these 128 publishers and editors would welcome electronically available theses and dissertations; others would consider the circumstances; and only 4% responded that submissions based on works previously posted electronically were never acceptable. When a student has produced a dissertation, even if it was an independent effort, the university may have some ownership of it because it was produced under the university's auspices and with university resources. For example, here at the University of Rochester, policies indicate that the dissertation author has control of work he or she produces while enrolled in a doctoral program but holds this control on behalf of the university, which can ask for return of the dissertation data and related materials, including reports of findings, if needed (ORPA, 1999). In theory, the university would recall the research materials to demonstrate to a funder or contractor that scientific integrity or ethical conduct was upheld. I don't know of such a recall of a nursing dissertation at any university, but I would be interested to hear from readers who are aware of such cases. When it is time to publish dissertation research results, the question of university ownership arises again, at least at Rochester: “The University ordinarily will not assert ownership of the copyright in a student's thesis … unless it is funded by externally sponsored research that requires the University to do so,” and “the University does own the copyright of works that are produced with the significant use of University resources” (ORPA, 2011, p. 3). No definition is provided for “significant use of University resources.” Hypothetically, university ownership might affect a dissertation project from Rochester's multimillion-dollar high-throughput computing center or its laser energy laboratory funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration, which are extremely expensive facilities that are subject to various contracts and controls. Do our students know when their work uses significant university resources or is subject to higher-level contractual obligations? At the same time, a university has a possibly competing interest to make new knowledge available to promote the public good and its own image. Some universities call on this social commitment when requiring that students post their dissertations in open-access institutional repositories (IRs). At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, “A tangible indicator of a university's quality and social impact, an IR demonstrates the scientific, social, and economic relevance of a university's research activities. By making their results easily accessible, an IR increases the institution's visibility, status, and public value.” (Penn Libraries, 2014, “About Scholarly Commons: Background,” para. 1). Thus, in addition to protecting their stake in certain intellectual property produced by students and the resources required to produce that intellectual property, universities and their libraries have an interest in the academic and humanitarian recognition that can accrue when students' work is disseminated under their auspices. As an editor, I am paid to fill issues of RINAH with articles that advance the science of nursing and health, so I aim to gain a stake in strong dissertations, and I try to persuade their authors to submit the work to this journal rather than another journal. Then, once the work has been submitted, I must be sure no other editor holds a competing stake that compromises the value of that submission. Unlike fiction or poetry editors, I join those health and social science editors who are unconcerned when a work has been widely available in dissertation form. As I have written before (Kearney, 2013), the process of peer review, revision, and editing transforms a work to a more readable, accurate, and qualitatively different piece of writing, so my interest in a PhD graduate's work is not threatened by an earlier 200-page thesis version. The RINAH version will be a new piece of writing that will carry more weight and reach more users. This treatment of a peer-reviewed version as the first publication of a given report is fairly universal in nursing journals and common across most health and social science fields. At the same time, editors do not turn a blind eye to duplicate publication of the same results in more than one peer-reviewed journal or to division of one set of study results into excessively small portions to produce a larger number of publications. Either of these serious author errors devalues the stake held by any of the involved journals. To most effectively interpret and apply the findings of a study, readers need to know the larger study context in which the findings were produced. If telling the whole story in one article means that an important manuscript will exceed page limits cited in the RINAH author guidelines, I will find the space. Some dissertations have sufficient complexity to support multiple publications, and some do not. Better to produce one important article and move on to the next study than to struggle for years to publish weaker, smaller bits. Publishers understandably are focused on what brings them profit. Journal publishers want to sell journals, and book publishers want to sell books. In some ways, their stake in dissertation-based manuscript submissions overlaps with that of editors, but the legal ownership of copyright rests with publishers, so the commodification of intellectual property is most apparent at the publisher level. Editors enjoy a good day's work when they secure the journal's interest in a manuscript of a dissertation project, but publishers stand to acquire the enduring copyright stakes. By and large, nursing journal publishers, like their editors, do not object when a work submitted for publication has been previously available as a dissertation. The website of Elsevier, publisher of many nursing journals, includes the statement, “Where a paper was originally authored as a thesis or dissertation, this is not generally viewed by Elsevier as ‘prior publication’ and therefore Elsevier will not require authors to remove electronic preprints of an article from public servers should the article be accepted for publication in an Elsevier journal” (Elsevier, 2014, “Article posting policy,” para. 5). However, a few Elsevier journals, including The Lancet and the journals in the Cell Press group, do object to prior posting of content in thesis form. Elsewhere, the New England Journal of Medicine has similar restrictions. I scoured the websites of a few other high-ranking journals and found little or no information about the acceptability of prior posting in dissertation form. RINAH author guidelines will be updated to state explicitly that submissions based on previously posted dissertations are welcome. If a submission is important, and a competitor publisher has not contracted for control over it, we are happy to have that content appear in these pages. The publisher will benefit because a much-cited and often-downloaded article will bring income and contribute to a strong journal impact factor, which then can lead to other important submissions, for the benefit of both the journal and the publisher. If most health and social science publishers accept electronically available dissertation work for later publication, why are creative arts journal and book publishers unwilling to consider it? Why has that work lost its value, when a science dissertation has not? And is all nursing and health scholarship published as science? I suggest that creative work is original and unique not just in its topic or content but in the medium in which it is conveyed, whether words or music or paint. The creation is more than the plot of the novel, the tune of the concerto, or the artifact analyzed by the historian. How the effect is delivered is inextricable from what the work is about. This idea goes back at least as far as Hegel, who opined that beauty is constituted by both form and content (Hegel, 1835/1998). Given the inseparability of creative form and content, once unleashed even in preliminary form, the creative product cannot be repackaged and reissued. Once it's out, it's out. This inseparability of form and content is qualitatively different from a scientific treatise or report of an analysis, regardless of how innovative the research may have been. A health science publisher who wants the content of a meritorious dissertation probably views it as unmarketable in its current form. Although a doctoral candidate may groan to read this, a lengthy multi-chapter dissertation is relatively inaccessible and not guaranteed to be of high quality. Peer review, editing, and publisher distribution is essential in our disciplines to vet the quality of content, format it for scientific consumption, and disseminate it for maximum impact on the field. What about publishing qualitative dissertations, in which findings about human experience are expressed in carefully-crafted words and phrases, and whose evocative and emotion-laden content reminds us of literature? Others may argue otherwise (and I welcome letters on this), but to my mind, qualitative research reports are still research reports. A qualitative research report might look like a humanities dissertation, but if it is destined for a health science journal, it will be transformed to fit that form of presentation. If it is destined to be a book, it will be reconfigured in a different way to tell a book-length story. A health science dissertation, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be beautifully written, but the restrictions imposed by its academic purpose mean that it is a different product than the property editors and publishers aim to acquire. The organization of information and even the language used to characterize the findings are likely to change in the peer review and editing process that precedes publication in a scientific journal. Dissertation ownership matters to you as a PhD student because, for a few of you, the concerns of the stakeholders outlined above will be barriers to your use of the dissertation to advance your career. The rest of you can put these concerns to rest. If you aim to publish your dissertation results in a venue such as the New England Journal of Medicine or a poetry journal, consult with your university about ways of protecting that option through an embargo or archiving of an abbreviated summary rather than the full work. If you have conducted an ethnographic or historical study and plan to publish it as a book after electronic thesis posting, it appears that most university presses will happily consider it, but if your targeted publisher will not, you may want to arrange an embargo. Sinor (2014) argued for paper-only preservation of creative work, electronic sharing only of introductory or overview material, and, if these are not possible, embargoes lasting at least 5 years for theses by students in the creative fields. The American Historical Association (2013) has called for embargoes of up to 6 years. An embargo or modified release makes sense for those of you in the situations above. ProQuest® and most university repositories offer renewable 2-year embargo periods, during which dissertations will not be made public. Students can take advantage of these options but should recognize that embargo renewal is not automatic and, based on anecdotal evidence, is not foolproof. Importantly, an embargo only helps you and your future readers if you publish the work before the embargo ends. If you fail to do so, the embargo only delays use of your research for the public good. If you have developed and validated a new psychometric instrument and plan to contract with a publisher to offer the tool for sale, a different solution should be considered. In the business world, for example, many tools to assess personality or interpersonal style are proprietary. Your instrument is unlikely to be marketable without extensive testing, and you may want to think twice about creating a cost barrier to potential users of an instrument designed to aid in promoting health, but the little evidence I have found indicates that an instrument publisher will require that the instrument has not appeared elsewhere. You may want to make the tool available from the author (you) on request, rather than presenting it in full in the dissertation. Most of you, who aim to publish your dissertation findings in nursing or health science journals other than those named above, need not be overly concerned about barriers to publication. Dissertation authors hold copyright to their work, regardless of whether you formally register the copyright, and use of significant portions by others would violate that copyright. Nonetheless, learn your university's dissertation archiving procedures and options, and discuss them with your advisors. In most cases you will complete both a university form stipulating conditions for institutional archiving and a ProQuest® form for worldwide indexing and sale. If you are unsure of how to complete these documents, seek consultation. The best possible solution to the threat of reduced publication options, small though that threat may be, is to publish as much as possible of your dissertation project while still a student and for doctoral programs to build this into program expectations. The “manuscript option” dissertation is one structure that facilitates this solution (Baggs, 2011; Gross, Alhusen, & Jennings, 2012), but, even if the dissertation is in a more traditional single-document form, components can be extracted and developed for publication before the complete dissertation is finalized. With guidance from your advisors, begin drafting a submission for publication as soon as the results of your literature review or data analysis are final, even if it means working on a separate dissertation document at the same time. Advantages are many: You will develop or strengthen your publication track record; advisors can more easily participate in manuscript development and revision than if submission is delayed until you have left the area; and editors and publishers will gain because you will submit work that otherwise might never see the light of day, once post-PhD demands creep in. Other potential stakeholders also have work to do. Universities should make public for students and faculty their policies on control or ownership of student work. Editors and publishers should make their positions clear on whether content from electronically available dissertations will be accepted for review or considered ineligible due to prior publication. In the meantime, students and their advisors should consider carefully the options for thesis archiving at their universities and make decisions driven not by paranoia but by good sense.