I've been having a conversation on Twitter with a colleague, and it's gotten to the point that I can no longer make my case in reasonable numbers of 140-character increments, so I've taken the liberty of moving the conversation over here to the blog. And hopefully, it will continue and draw in other participants in the comments feed. I'm curious to hear what others think about the question of making theses and dissertations more widely available than they are.
Let me start, then, with a bit of background for those who might be wandering into it over here for the first time.
About two weeks ago, I was more than a little dismayed to find this tweet in my Twitter feed:
After a panicked few minutes in which I made sure that the link did not actually lead to a PDF of my dissertation, per the terms of the embargo that I opted into when I filed, I replied with my dismay. I tried to keep the tone light, but I was really quite unhappy about this development:
Today, after finding that this colleague had tweeted someone else's thesis (an M.A.-level one in this case, I tweeted the following:
And this conversation ensued:
