The Grad­u­ate School’s pol­icy of hav­ing dis­ser­ta­tions sub­mit­ted into Data­Space, the University’s Open Access repos­i­tory, has been changed tem­porar­ily, pend­ing res­o­lu­tion of some out­stand­ing ques­tions. David Red­man, Asso­ciate Dean of the Grad­u­ate School, sent the fol­low­ing mes­sage out late today. If you have any ques­tions, :

Dear Direc­tors of Grad­u­ate Studies,

As many of you know, the Grad­u­ate School, work­ing with the Uni­ver­sity Archives, estab­lished last fall new pro­ce­dures for the sub­mis­sion of Ph.D. dis­ser­ta­tions to Pro­Quest. Two sig­nif­i­cant changes were: a) agree­ing to use ProQuest’s Elec­tronic The­ses and Dis­ser­ta­tions (ETD) sub­mis­sion por­tal, which greatly speeded the abil­ity of stu­dents to sub­mit their dis­ser­ta­tions; and b) elim­i­nat­ing the neces­sity of a sec­ond hard-bound copy of the dis­ser­ta­tion in favor of stor­ing an elec­tronic copy of the dis­ser­ta­tion on Princeton’s Data­Space and mak­ing the elec­tronic “sec­ond copy” acces­si­ble there. One con­se­quence of the sec­ond change was that our stu­dents’ dis­ser­ta­tions became almost instantly acces­si­ble to any­one with a good search engine. In short, Prince­ton dis­ser­ta­tions were “out there” in the world faster than we had imag­ined. This has caused some anx­i­ety and dis­tress among many of our new Ph.D.’s, so much so that we are amend­ing our pro­ce­dures in the fol­low­ing way.

By the end of this month, we will restrict access to doc­toral dis­ser­ta­tions in Data­Space to those on the Princeton.edu domain, that is, to on-campus users.

This is an interim and (we hope) rel­a­tively short term address to a larger prob­lem of easy and fast access to Ph.D. dis­ser­ta­tions at a time when stu­dents, par­tic­u­larly those in the human­i­ties and social sci­ences, are anx­ious about their oppor­tu­ni­ties to pub­lish their work and advance in their careers. The Grad­u­ate School has already had pre­lim­i­nary dis­cus­sion with some mem­bers of the Pol­icy Sub­com­mit­tee about this issue and wants to con­tinue the dis­cus­sion with them about refin­ing our poli­cies and procedures.

Thank you for your inter­est in and con­cern about this issue. If you have any ques­tions, please do not hes­i­tate to call (x8-3902) or write me ().

UPDATE: As of today, March 23, dis­ser­ta­tions in Data­Space are now restricted to on-campus users only. How­ever, please note that if Google has cached a PDF that it crawled pre­vi­ously, that PDF will remain in Google’s cache until Google expires it. That typ­i­cally takes a cou­ple of weeks, but that’s entirely up to Google.

UPDATE: As of Novem­ber 5, all dis­ser­ta­tions that have not been granted an embargo are avail­able via Dataspace.