Publisher Issues

The ETD initiative provides you a unique opportunity to learn more about publishing. The skills acquired in doing an ETD will serve you well as you continue to produce works of scholarship, more so if you choose to remain in higher education. We encourage you to start learning about publishing issues in the process of preparing/submitting your ETD.

Suppose you intend to publish all or part of your thesis or dissertation as a book or article after you have your degree. It will matter little to most publishers if you made your ETD available only to people on the GW campus or in the Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC). If you make your ETD available worldwide, then some publishers may be concerned that making the work so widely available for free will limit their ability to make money publishing the work.

With respect to professional journals, some insist on first publication and might interpret availability through the Internet as prior publication of the work. They may not want to accept your article for that reason.

In many cases, though, what you submit to a journal will be considerably different from the material in your thesis or dissertation. Making your ETD available worldwide should therefore have no bearing on your ability to get an article based on the thesis or dissertation published, and most journal publishers recognize this.

It is not easy to generalize about which journals might adopt which policy, however. To be certain, you would need to identify in advance the journals to which you might wish to submit your article and find out their position on this issue.

What if you want to publish a book based on your thesis or dissertation? Some academic books have very small potential sales. Anything that means that some potential buyers will not purchase the book but will obtain it in some other way reduces sales. A potential publisher may assess the likely sales and conclude that the work just cannot be published economically.

On the other hand, some observers argue that availability on the Web, because people will neither read a full book on screen nor print the whole thing out, serves to market the work, arousing readers’ interest in buying it. Indeed, there is some evidence that sales of the book may be enhanced.

Also, a book based on a thesis or dissertation is usually quite different from the thesis or dissertation by the time the author is done with it. It is extremely rare that a dissertation is published as a book without major revisions. Indeed, most authors spend several years rewriting and developing the ideas and arguments in their dissertations. The more your book manuscript differs from your dissertation, the less it will matter to a publisher whether or not the original dissertation is available electronically.

These issues are relatively new; nothing certain can yet be said. You may want to take the cautious view and assume that the publisher with whom you would like to publish your book will be concerned if your work is readily available through the Internet. The publisher may have no problem with your making the dissertation available immediately through the Internet. At worst, the publisher might want you to extend the period in which you restrict or "embargo" access to your dissertation. ProQuest allows for 6 month, 1 year, and 2 year embargoes on the public release of dissertations, if such an embargo is needed.

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