ProQuest and Scribd Partner on Dissertations and Theses Marketplace
Joint effort will expose scholarly graduate work to broader audience online
Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 11/19/2009
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- 14,000+ works from 14 institutions available for $49 each
- 20% preview, and some search capabilities
- Partnership follows ProQuest objection to Google settlement's handling of dissertations and theses
On November 16, ProQuest and social publishing company Scribd announced a partnership to place some 14,000 dissertations and theses in the latter's online document marketplace. The documents—so far representing graduate work from 14 universities—will sell for $49, of which 80% will go to ProQuest.
The partnership will supplement ProQuest's Dissertations and Theses product, which provides access to abstracts and some full-text to more than two million works, and expose a potentially larger demographic to these scholarly works.
"Academic research is one of the fastest growing content categories on Scribd," said Trip Adler, Scribd CEO and co-founder. The theses and dissertations currently available have come from the University of Michigan, Princeton University, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Rutgers University, and Washington University in St. Louis, among others. According to Scribd, other research organizations publishing on the site include Harvard University Press, the MIT Press, and the World Bank.
Long-tail efforts
As with the recent spate of print-on-demand editions of digitized text being made available through consumer channels like Amazon subsidiary BookSurge and Kirtas Books, those behind the new effort apparently hope that increased visibility will drive increased interest and sales, or least enough to sustain this long-tail effort.
On Scribd, a roughly 20% preview of each document is available, typically enough to include the abstract, front matter, and table of contents. In addition, some—but not all—of the documents are searchable, though the search includes only the preview material.
Response to Google Settlement?
This deal follows shortly on the heels of ProQuest's objection to the proposed Google Book Search settlement. In documents filed with the federal court, ProQuest argued that the settlement's definition of "book" is overly broad, and could lead Google to erroneously include many dissertations and theses in its scanning efforts. This then would give Google an unfair advantage, ProQuest claimed, given its efforts to collect those materials in compliance with existing copyright requirements, and to work directly with copyright holders individually.
Contact the author: josh.hadro@reedbusiness.com
An example dissertation preview available through Scribd:
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