Gail Clement edited untitled.md  almost 8 years ago

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### Introduction  An increasing proportion of American universities now require submission of doctoral dissertations to open access repositories, leaving graduate students with repositories. When given  the choice whether to also submit their scholarship to a commercial dissertation reseller reseller, graduate students decline this practice as duplicative and unecessary  \cite{Clement_2013}.Respecting Student Choice in Disseminating their ETDs  This significant development in open access movement away from mandatory paywalls for American graduate  scholarshipand open science publishing  recognizes that the obsolete practice of dissertation microfilming and reselling -- established in the pre-digital era of the the early-mid 1900's -- is no longer the "best" technology for effectively copying, preserving, and widely disseminatinglengthy  academic manuscripts. Moreover, housing electronic theses and dissertations in scholarly repositories affords more flexible and appropriate curation of multimedia and dynamic outputs not optimally containerized in a PDF file with static supplements. Distribution via open access networks exposes the works to broad potential audiences without the barriers of commercial paywalls, corporate copyright warnings, and one-size-fits-all file management and metadata ill-suited for curating evolving forms of living, dynamic, data-rich graduate student scholarlship. The ubiquity of academic scholarship on the Internet and the ready availability of rich online digital media provide superior methods to broadly disseminate and responsibly preserve dissertations. Submission and discovery of dissertations via Open Access repositories and broad dissemination via scholarly sharing networks such as SHARE offer much greater exposure, access to, and the potential for reuse of electronic theses and dissertations. Institution decision makers interested in reviewing the many benefits of open ETDs in Open Access repositories may find the associated reading list of interest.