Scribd to publish dissertations and theses
By Paul Biba
Scribd has teamed up with ProQuestUMI, a publisher of dissertations and theses, to start selling over 14,000 works, form over 14 universities, in its Scribd Store.
ProQuestUMI will charge $49 and sill receive 80% of the sales revenues. This is a big market as they have 2 million doctoral dissertations and master’s theses available from more than 700 active university partners and update their catalog with more than 70,000 new graduate works each year.
You can find out more at here.
November 17th, 2009 at 10:34 am
Would be interesting to know what ProQuest does with its 80%.
Have students assigned their rights to universities and universities to ProQuest?
November 17th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Exactly my question: these should be open access and available for free. If not that, then the student should get the lion’s share: why does ProQuest deserve anything??
November 17th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Interesting. My thesis contained reprints of several papers that I published as a researcher, papers where copyright was assigned to the journal. I wonder how Scribd will cope with this….
November 17th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
For as long as I can tell, grad students submitting to ProQuest always retain copyright but give ProQuest the right to reproduce, distribute and sell copies. ProQuest pays authors a certain portion of the revenue (not very much, unless your dissertation is a hit). Students can opt to have their thesis/diss open access with ProQuest, but this costs the student extra $$.
The copy that is sold, today, has gone through a permissions clearance and other “value-add” measures, this copy is ProQuests and nobody elses. I’m not sure how long they have been doing this.