The PhD Chronicles: The Dissertation In the Wild

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Since graduation, two things have happened.  The first is that the dissertation itself has been published on ScholarWorks at UMASS Boston.  You can look, download, read, enjoy(?) the full text here.  

I am particularly happy that I could make it open-access and ready for everyone to freely access.  One of the running jokes I had with the participants in the study was explaining the process of the next steps.  I would say something to the effect that, "Once I defend the dissertation, I will be putting it up on my website for a reasonable fee of $99.99."  It got a chuckle because, well, it still strikes me how many articles and books are about open-access research and are prohibitively expensive.  

Now that it was available, I did my best to return to some of the communities on Reddit and elsewhere to let folks know that it had been published.  Because of the levels of anonymity with participants I maintained, I have no direct contacts or names of them at this juncture.  So I wanted to make sure that I went back to the places that I found them and let them know it is now available.  

I'm also glad that it was published with ScholarWorks.  One benefit of having been in the program for a decade is that the institution switched to ScholarWorks from ProQuest for its repository.  ProQuest was charging students to pay $95 to publish their dissertation as open-access.  Talk about a ridiculous money grab! All it entailed was ProQuest giving it a right that the author inherently had.  

I was ready to fight that if it became an issue (I had started emailing) to look for some justification for that to happen, but well, I didn't have to.  

What also came this week, was the printed and bound version of the dissertation.  This was something I chose to do and pay for.  I have physical copies of all the major works that I've done in my education from my Honor's thesis (on the misunderstandings of the medieval Russian witchhunt) and Master's thesis (on trans history and representation in media through the lens of Nip/Tuck season 2).  And well, while I did all of my work digitally for the dissertation (reading, annotating, writing, editing, etc), I still wanted the physical copy.  

UMB directed students to a few different sites to bind and print their dissertations and I found PhD Book Binding to have the best prices and cleanest process.

Anyway, if you get the chance to take a look, briefly or more in-depth--I'd love to hear your thoughts.  You can share them there or reach out to me directly.

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