Scheduled for 2:30-3:20 in Room 601, 66 W 12th Street

In 2013, the American Historical Association put out a statement encouraging graduate programs and university libraries to allow students to embargo their dissertations for up to 6 years. They wrote, “History has been and remains a book-based discipline, and the requirement that dissertations be published online poses a tangible threat to the interests and careers of junior scholars in particular.” I propose a session where we talk about open access and the history dissertation. I’d like the conversation to include many different voices, from grad students to librarians to professors. Some potential questions I’m interested in exploring include:

Why might graduate students want to make their dissertation open access?

How can history departments and libraries work together to ensure that graduate students know and understand the different options for distributing their work?

What’s the main purpose of a history dissertation anyways?