From: Joe Touch (touch@ISI.EDU)
Date: Tue Aug 15 2000 - 11:51:41 PDT
"Eric M. Dashofy (by way of Rohit Khare)" wrote:
>
> Well, I came across an article on Slashdot, and I was a little intrigued by
> it.
>
> http://slashdot.org/yro/00/08/14/2019202.shtml
>
> Basically, there is a site (http://www.contentville.com/) (with the help of
> another company, UMI (http://www.umi.com/ )) that has compiled a database of
> academic dissertations and is selling them. I saw the theses of several
> folks I know on there, just doing a quick spot-check, including Greg Bolcer,
> Neno Medvidovic, Ken Anderson, Michal Young, etc. Their dissertations are
> selling for about $25 each in PDF format. According to the site:
>
> --begin excerpt
> Where do Contentville's dissertations come from?
>
> Excerpts from the UMI® Dissertation Abstracts database are being used by
> Contentville, which, in turn, collects orders for full-text dissertations.
> Dissertation orders are fulfilled by UMI® Dissertations Publishing, whose
> mission is to expand scholarly communication and improve access to academic
> research. All Dissertation Publishing Agreements with authors remain in
> effect. Dissertation authors retain all rights to their dissertations. All
> sales will be tracked for royalty payments. All contracted royalties will be
> paid, per the agreement. The UMI program continues to expand access to
> research and maintain a permanent archive of scholarly works. Wider
> distribution of dissertation research is intended to support the
> international scholarly community.
> --end excerpt
>
> I usually find myself on the "a lot of information should probably be free
> (available), especially academic works used for educational purposes" side
> of a debate, but these folks are SELLING other people's work. I don't know
> the exact copyright laws/restrictions regarding academic dissertations, but
> this might be worth a look if you're worried about your copyrights being
> infringed and collecting appropriate royalties, etc.
I just had my dissertation pointed out as being on Contentville.
It's consistent with it also being available from UMI - in fact, as per
above, it's just passed on through. In order to graduate, I had to sign
rights to reproduce (whether they're exclusive or not I'd have to check)
over to UMI; they can sell them on my behalf, but I get an appropriate
royalty.
Given that they charge $40 or so for around 300 pages, that's cheap
enough to compete with printing your own (around $20) and getting a
decent binding. That's not a high educational hurdle.
Joe
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Aug 15 2000 - 11:55:44 PDT