How to get an easy, but obscure service
June 11, 2010 5:45 AM Subscribe
How can I use Craigslist to find students who will scan dissertations from their local universities for me for a nominal fee?
I haven't really used Craigslist yet, so what I'm looking for is advice on how I could do this most effectively. I would also like to know if others think this is the best way to obtain dissertations. Most Universities aren't willing to lend Masters theses, and seem to demand about $40 for a digital copy. It takes less than an hour to scan a dissertation and send it over email, so I think many people (especially students who study at their libraries) would be willing to do it for about $10, if they knew someone wanted such a thing.
I haven't really used Craigslist yet, so what I'm looking for is advice on how I could do this most effectively. I would also like to know if others think this is the best way to obtain dissertations. Most Universities aren't willing to lend Masters theses, and seem to demand about $40 for a digital copy. It takes less than an hour to scan a dissertation and send it over email, so I think many people (especially students who study at their libraries) would be willing to do it for about $10, if they knew someone wanted such a thing.
This post was deleted for the following reason: poster's request -- cortex
I'd contact your local university reference librarian first before going the scanning route. Some dissertations (from all over the world) are available online through services such as Proquest. You would need access to an institutional subscription, but a guest pass at a local academic library might be enough (if you go there in person and download dissertations to a memory stick/email them to yourself). Universities are also increasingly providing the option (or even demanding) digital deposit of dissertations and some make these available for free.
posted by col_pogo at 5:55 AM on June 11, 2010
posted by col_pogo at 5:55 AM on June 11, 2010
The authors of those dissertations own the copyright in them, so what you're attempting to do would likely violate that copyright if you've not received their permission to duplicate their work. I think col_pogo has the better approach.
posted by modernnomad at 6:11 AM on June 11, 2010 [6 favorites]
posted by modernnomad at 6:11 AM on June 11, 2010 [6 favorites]
modernnomad is exactly right - what you're proposing to do is likely be a breach of copyright, and not the copyright of some giant corporation either but of individual students. If you're using them for non-commercial research you might be within the spirit, but almost certainly not the letter of the law. If it's for consultancy or political purposes you're definitely not. You're also almost certainly encouraging students to break their university regulations on copying materials, which are taken very seriously now and could have implications for the students - that's of course their own prerogative, assuming they've read them.
The university libraries will have a mechanism for licensing thesis content, and it might even be free in some cases. Use it, rather than ripping off students.
posted by cromagnon at 6:30 AM on June 11, 2010
The university libraries will have a mechanism for licensing thesis content, and it might even be free in some cases. Use it, rather than ripping off students.
posted by cromagnon at 6:30 AM on June 11, 2010
In rough preference order:
(1) Ignore the dissertation/thesis and look for publications by the same author.
(2) Email the author and ask them to email you a copy.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:32 AM on June 11, 2010
(1) Ignore the dissertation/thesis and look for publications by the same author.
(2) Email the author and ask them to email you a copy.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:32 AM on June 11, 2010
Use it, rather than ripping off students.
You wouldn't really be ripping off a student. UMI won't pay a dime until the total royalties add up to $25, and the royalty is only 10% of net revenue. So in order to get any royalties at all, many people would have to buy the dissertation. The probability of this is very, very low.
In any case, the odds of there being valuable information in a dissertation or especially a masters thesis that never made it into a journal article or book are quite low. Most of the good ideas make it into publication, and most of the ideas that don't get published... there's a reason.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:42 AM on June 11, 2010
You wouldn't really be ripping off a student. UMI won't pay a dime until the total royalties add up to $25, and the royalty is only 10% of net revenue. So in order to get any royalties at all, many people would have to buy the dissertation. The probability of this is very, very low.
In any case, the odds of there being valuable information in a dissertation or especially a masters thesis that never made it into a journal article or book are quite low. Most of the good ideas make it into publication, and most of the ideas that don't get published... there's a reason.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:42 AM on June 11, 2010
Response by poster: Thanks. In response to col_pogo, yes I am currently able to get 90% of dissertations for free through an interlibrary loan service. It's the other 10% I'd like to be able to read more reasonably.
The libraries aren't trying to turn a profit, some just have inefficient services. Most colleges send me such theses with no fee or compunction.
posted by dgaicun at 6:50 AM on June 11, 2010
The libraries aren't trying to turn a profit, some just have inefficient services. Most colleges send me such theses with no fee or compunction.
posted by dgaicun at 6:50 AM on June 11, 2010
This used to be part of my job at a university library. When a patron came to us who wanted a copy of a masters thesis, we would:
1. Ask the Alumni Records office for contact information for the author. If the author was dead, we could make the copy without permission.
2. Write to the author asking for written permission to make a one-time copy of his/her thesis. The University's lawyers wanted this to be a hard-copy permission, so we sent the author a form that they were to sign and mail back to us.
3. If the author gave permission, we could copy the thesis. We would charge the patron for both the copying and the permissions search process. For most theses, the total cost was around $35.
As you can imagine, this is a slow process that does not always yield success. I had one author who insisted on knowing who was requesting the copy - but due to our library's policy on patron confidentiality, I couldn't tell her, so she declined to give permission. We also could not pass on the author's contact information to the patron.
If the patron wanted a dissertation, we referred them to Dissertation Express, a service of ProQuest (formerly University Microfilms), where they could purchase copies for about $45.
Is this an expensive and cumbersome process? Hell yes. But it's the best process we could come up with that respected the rights of the authors.
posted by shiny blue object at 6:56 AM on June 11, 2010 [1 favorite]
1. Ask the Alumni Records office for contact information for the author. If the author was dead, we could make the copy without permission.
2. Write to the author asking for written permission to make a one-time copy of his/her thesis. The University's lawyers wanted this to be a hard-copy permission, so we sent the author a form that they were to sign and mail back to us.
3. If the author gave permission, we could copy the thesis. We would charge the patron for both the copying and the permissions search process. For most theses, the total cost was around $35.
As you can imagine, this is a slow process that does not always yield success. I had one author who insisted on knowing who was requesting the copy - but due to our library's policy on patron confidentiality, I couldn't tell her, so she declined to give permission. We also could not pass on the author's contact information to the patron.
If the patron wanted a dissertation, we referred them to Dissertation Express, a service of ProQuest (formerly University Microfilms), where they could purchase copies for about $45.
Is this an expensive and cumbersome process? Hell yes. But it's the best process we could come up with that respected the rights of the authors.
posted by shiny blue object at 6:56 AM on June 11, 2010 [1 favorite]
"Ripping off" would be pejorative if the OP wants to use the dissertations in his own thesis. It's exactly accurate if he's doing paid consultancy for a medical lawyer - just to pick a possible reason from very many.
And your assertion that theses and Masters dissertations don't contain useful information outside the peer-reviewed literature is wrong - the context, detailed methodologies, wider discursive sections, extra references, citations and footnotes that journals routinely exclude in scientific fields can be invaluable. In the humanities, it can take even a successful academic several years to get a monograph or book published, but the thesis can be available the week after the defence exam.
posted by cromagnon at 7:12 AM on June 11, 2010
And your assertion that theses and Masters dissertations don't contain useful information outside the peer-reviewed literature is wrong - the context, detailed methodologies, wider discursive sections, extra references, citations and footnotes that journals routinely exclude in scientific fields can be invaluable. In the humanities, it can take even a successful academic several years to get a monograph or book published, but the thesis can be available the week after the defence exam.
posted by cromagnon at 7:12 AM on June 11, 2010
It's exactly accurate if he's doing paid consultancy for a medical lawyer - just to pick a possible reason from very many.
You can only rip off the author of a thesis or dissertation that might otherwise have earned royalties. The vast, overwhelming majority of theses and dissertations will never under any circumstances come close to earning a royalty for their author.
And your assertion that theses and Masters dissertations don't contain useful information outside the peer-reviewed literature is wrong - the context, detailed methodologies, wider discursive sections, extra references, citations and footnotes that journals routinely exclude in scientific fields can be invaluable.
If something in a published article or book seems unclear, I would just ask the author. Dear author, I was reading X and wondered Y. Do you have an earlier version of the project that explains Y in greater detail?
In any case, dgaicun's first tactic should be to contact the author and request a copy. For several reasons.
First, they're likely to just send it to you instead of you paying anything. A few misguided souls have actually bought my dissertation. But if they'd just emailed me, I'd have sent them the pdf. On the one hand, it's a choice between receiving $0 and making someone pay UMI, or receiving $0 and saving someone $37. On the other hand, even if it cost me some negligible royalty, I'm far better off making it as easy as possible for people to read my stuff.
Second, contacting the author gives them the opportunity to send it but ask you to cite a related work instead. In the instances where people have bought and cited my dissertation, I would much rather that they had cited one or more of the articles that emerged from it instead. It doesn't do much for me to bump the cite count of my dissertation from (say) four to five. It helps me more to bump the cite count of an article from *looks it up* 53 to 54 or 7 to 8, and it helps the journal too.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:49 AM on June 11, 2010 [1 favorite]
You can only rip off the author of a thesis or dissertation that might otherwise have earned royalties. The vast, overwhelming majority of theses and dissertations will never under any circumstances come close to earning a royalty for their author.
And your assertion that theses and Masters dissertations don't contain useful information outside the peer-reviewed literature is wrong - the context, detailed methodologies, wider discursive sections, extra references, citations and footnotes that journals routinely exclude in scientific fields can be invaluable.
If something in a published article or book seems unclear, I would just ask the author. Dear author, I was reading X and wondered Y. Do you have an earlier version of the project that explains Y in greater detail?
In any case, dgaicun's first tactic should be to contact the author and request a copy. For several reasons.
First, they're likely to just send it to you instead of you paying anything. A few misguided souls have actually bought my dissertation. But if they'd just emailed me, I'd have sent them the pdf. On the one hand, it's a choice between receiving $0 and making someone pay UMI, or receiving $0 and saving someone $37. On the other hand, even if it cost me some negligible royalty, I'm far better off making it as easy as possible for people to read my stuff.
Second, contacting the author gives them the opportunity to send it but ask you to cite a related work instead. In the instances where people have bought and cited my dissertation, I would much rather that they had cited one or more of the articles that emerged from it instead. It doesn't do much for me to bump the cite count of my dissertation from (say) four to five. It helps me more to bump the cite count of an article from *looks it up* 53 to 54 or 7 to 8, and it helps the journal too.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:49 AM on June 11, 2010 [1 favorite]
As an academic librarian, at my institution when we don't lend these through interlibrary loan, it's because the author has requested we not do so. And in most cases, this is because the work is being used as the basis for a book. You'd do better to contact the person who wrote the thesis and ask.
And please keep in mind two things:
1) the student you're proposing to pay $10 to scan will be the person who is breaking the copyright because he or she is doing the actual copying, and thus you are asking them to break the law for $10 which, to my mind, is hardly fair compensation
2) having worked in a project in grad school where we scanned books in, $10 for an entire thesis is way too little for the amount of time (and sheer boredom) it's going to take to scan it in, convert to a sendable format, and send. And we were using a $40K scanner especially designed for bound books that took just a few seconds per page! $10 ain't gonna hack it. It's cheaper to pay the $40.
posted by telophase at 8:15 AM on June 11, 2010
And please keep in mind two things:
1) the student you're proposing to pay $10 to scan will be the person who is breaking the copyright because he or she is doing the actual copying, and thus you are asking them to break the law for $10 which, to my mind, is hardly fair compensation
2) having worked in a project in grad school where we scanned books in, $10 for an entire thesis is way too little for the amount of time (and sheer boredom) it's going to take to scan it in, convert to a sendable format, and send. And we were using a $40K scanner especially designed for bound books that took just a few seconds per page! $10 ain't gonna hack it. It's cheaper to pay the $40.
posted by telophase at 8:15 AM on June 11, 2010
Response by poster: A lot of the stuff I'm looking at is for its meta historical value. The theses are found as references in old books, and the authors have no web trail whatever.
It's not remotely plausible someone would get in trouble for scanning a student paper on rat hormones from 1962. From an ethical standpoint, these are papers anyone is free to read if they can physically walk into the library. Technology here serves only as a proxy for existing in a different location.
posted by dgaicun at 8:37 AM on June 11, 2010
It's not remotely plausible someone would get in trouble for scanning a student paper on rat hormones from 1962. From an ethical standpoint, these are papers anyone is free to read if they can physically walk into the library. Technology here serves only as a proxy for existing in a different location.
posted by dgaicun at 8:37 AM on June 11, 2010
If it's ethical to copy dissertations because they are free to read, why not popular literature?
You are advocating copyright infringement. Please at least be honest about that.
posted by saeculorum at 8:45 AM on June 11, 2010
You are advocating copyright infringement. Please at least be honest about that.
posted by saeculorum at 8:45 AM on June 11, 2010
Response by poster: Because there is not a single copy of popular literature archived in a library; it is sold for profit. The two scenarios could hardly be more distinct.
posted by dgaicun at 8:50 AM on June 11, 2010
posted by dgaicun at 8:50 AM on June 11, 2010
I don't get the copyright infringement issue. Is the OP planning on ripping them off, or citing them in his/her own research like any other publication or unpublished ms?
The former is obviously problematic in ways that have nothing to do with the fact that these are dissertations rather than anything else. The latter is obviously unproblematic.
posted by kestrel251 at 9:09 AM on June 11, 2010
The former is obviously problematic in ways that have nothing to do with the fact that these are dissertations rather than anything else. The latter is obviously unproblematic.
posted by kestrel251 at 9:09 AM on June 11, 2010
If this is for any serious purpose, I think the sorts of people who would do the mind-numbingly tedious work for $10/hr or $10/copy are not the people you want doing it for you. Also people doing it cheap and fast may mistreat the physical copies, which would be bad karma.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:51 AM on June 11, 2010
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:51 AM on June 11, 2010
Response by poster: Ideally I could "swap": copy a thesis for someone, who could copy a thesis for me. But the demand is too low to support that.
Of course I can experiment with prices on craigslist. I was just going by what I would have done if there was a flyer hanging in my library as a student. It takes less than 10 minutes to photograph 100 pages with a digital camera.
posted by dgaicun at 11:08 AM on June 11, 2010
Of course I can experiment with prices on craigslist. I was just going by what I would have done if there was a flyer hanging in my library as a student. It takes less than 10 minutes to photograph 100 pages with a digital camera.
posted by dgaicun at 11:08 AM on June 11, 2010
This sounds like a service you are planning to offer, or a thesis version of google books? Do be wary about the copyright issue, whether its right or fair or not in your world. Universities in the US retain copyright on a whole lot of theses, for example MIT does under the following conditions:
"1. the thesis research is performed in whole or in part by the student with financial
support in the form of wages, salary, stipend, or grant from funds administered by
the Institute and/or
2. the thesis research is performed in whole or in part utilizing equipment or facilities
provided to the Institute under conditions that impose copyright restrictions.
In general, students may retain ownership of thesis copyrights when the only form of
support is from (1) teaching assistantships (the duties of which do not include research
activities) and (2) NSF and NIH traineeships and fellowships (although the trainee or fellow may be required to grant certain publishing rights to NSF or NIH). Actual determination of a student's status is made by reference to the account from which the student receives support." source
I don't think they'd be the first to burn you, but there seems to be a potential for a world of hurt.
posted by whatzit at 12:02 PM on June 11, 2010
"1. the thesis research is performed in whole or in part by the student with financial
support in the form of wages, salary, stipend, or grant from funds administered by
the Institute and/or
2. the thesis research is performed in whole or in part utilizing equipment or facilities
provided to the Institute under conditions that impose copyright restrictions.
In general, students may retain ownership of thesis copyrights when the only form of
support is from (1) teaching assistantships (the duties of which do not include research
activities) and (2) NSF and NIH traineeships and fellowships (although the trainee or fellow may be required to grant certain publishing rights to NSF or NIH). Actual determination of a student's status is made by reference to the account from which the student receives support." source
I don't think they'd be the first to burn you, but there seems to be a potential for a world of hurt.
posted by whatzit at 12:02 PM on June 11, 2010
Because there is not a single copy of popular literature archived in a library; it is sold for profit. The two scenarios could hardly be more distinct.
Alas, this is not how copyright works.
Again, if you are hoping to do this to form any kind of commercial service, I strongly, STRONGLY urge you to reconsider. As an academic, if I found out someone was profiting from my work, any of my work, even as a student, without the proper permissions, I would certainly come after you.
If you're doing this for your own personal research and the copies will not ever go beyond you (ie, they're not online, you don't retransmit them, etc), then you might have an argument under educational exemptions to copyright, but even those rarely include the ENTIRE work in question.
posted by modernnomad at 12:52 PM on June 11, 2010
Alas, this is not how copyright works.
Again, if you are hoping to do this to form any kind of commercial service, I strongly, STRONGLY urge you to reconsider. As an academic, if I found out someone was profiting from my work, any of my work, even as a student, without the proper permissions, I would certainly come after you.
If you're doing this for your own personal research and the copies will not ever go beyond you (ie, they're not online, you don't retransmit them, etc), then you might have an argument under educational exemptions to copyright, but even those rarely include the ENTIRE work in question.
posted by modernnomad at 12:52 PM on June 11, 2010
Response by poster: It is not remotely plausible this would lead to any trouble for myself or anyone else. This typical Internet copyright meltdown is exceedingly unhelpful to me.
The first response is the only one that comes close to the kind of advise I was looking for. I've asked cortex to ax the thread.
posted by dgaicun at 1:16 PM on June 11, 2010
The first response is the only one that comes close to the kind of advise I was looking for. I've asked cortex to ax the thread.
posted by dgaicun at 1:16 PM on June 11, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 5:54 AM on June 11, 2010