bluesyemre

• The American Historical Association has spied itself a Problem with a capital P and it is determined to do something about it. That problem? Too many people are reading history doctoral dissertations on the Internet. This madness must be stopped, the AHA thought to itself. We can’t have all these people reading scholarly works online, for free. And so, the AHA crafted a solution, not a perfect one — what solution is? — but something that might help, something that might prevent all these people from reading all these dissertations. Yesterday, in a statement posted online, where everybody may read it (and many have), the AHA encouraged graduate programs and university libraries to “adopt a policy that allows the embargoing of completed PhD dissertations” from the Internet for six years. It is the AHA’s position that they want universities to provide a choice to young PhDs, but I worry they are addressing the wrong problem, and doing so with the wrong tool.

http://j.mp/14OZJEM