Submit dissertation to ProQuest?

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Werg

Medical Physics
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I'm getting close to finishing my PhD in medical physics. My university has a requirement that dissertations be submitted to the company ProQuest for electronic and microfilm archiving. The student has to pay a fee for this (something like $100, but the exact amount is unclear to me).

ProQuest claims to have the largest repository of theses and dissertations and "ProQuest's dissertation research tools have been the primary sources used to cite published dissertations and theses for decades." I personally have never come across any material cited as part of ProQuest's literature and have only heard their name in association with this requirement. Granted, it may just be that my field has not needed such a service.

My question is: has anyone submitted their dissertation to this company before? Does it provide any benefit?

Microfilim is clearly obsolete at this point. Generally in physics, students will post their theses and dissertations to arXiv.org, which is considered the definitive repository of "non-journal" literature and e-prints.

It is a requirement at my university, but I am considering filing a waiver request because it doesn't seem like a very good bang for the buck.
 
So, you probably can get away without proquest if you're hard up for cash. I think these companies were more important back in the day of microfilm, when someone needed to store these things for access.

Now, most universities have their theses available electronically in some sort of database, either for the university or for the state (e.g. http://repositories.tdl.org/tdl-ir/handle/2249.1/9387) . So, simply by submitting a PDF your university is most likely to post it online for the world to obtain.

My thesis was submitted to proquest/umi, but only because I didn't have a choice. They were the company the university had chosen to manage their database and basically handle print publication of the document. And it wasn't optional. We didn't have to pay proquest directly, but we did have to pay an $87 graduation fee, of which I suspect a portion went to proquest.

The only upside was that you could order nice hardbound color copies of your thesis for a fairly reasonable price (like $40 or something. I suppose if you're balking at the proquest fee, you may say this is too much, but my thesis had a ton of color pages and it would have cost much more at Kinkos). These are nice to give to your parents and and your advisor may appreciate one as well.
 
Thanks for the reply. I hadn't thought about hard copies yet and where they might come from.

My university has its own electronic repository and we have to submit to that as well, but I have no issue there (for one thing, it's free).
 
I'm writing from ProQuest and would like to add some additional information regarding the benefits of publishing with our company.

ProQuest publishes nearly 80,000 PhDs and Master's Theses each year, and has been doing so since 1939. We collect and aggregate dissertations from all over the world into our ProQuest Dissertation and Theses database (PQDT), which I'm fairly certain your library subscribes to. This database is used by 3,000 universities all over the world, and by millions of researchers. Last year PQDT was searched over 200 million times, so it is a great compliment to a university or subject-based repository in terms of gaining visibility for your research.

We also provide dissertation citations to all the major subject indexes, for example in the field of physics we provide citations to Institute of Physics, for loading into their database. This further helps promote your research.

We provide each dissertation with an ISBN, which authors are very excited about including as part of their CV.

Also, we pay authors a royalty on all sales, so you benefit from the sale of your work in paper, PDF or microform.

A full list of the benefits of publishing with ProQuest can be found here: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/authors.shtml

We do sell authors deeply discounted copies of their works in hardcover format. We find that many authors want copies to give to their committee members, family, etc.

Finally, if your university uses the ProQuest / UMI ETD Administrator (www.etdadmin.com) to submit dissertation and theses to ProQuest, there is no fee to the student.

I hope that this information is helpful.

Thanks,

Austin McLean
Director of Scholarly Communication and Dissertation Publishing
ProQuest / UMI
 
Follow up to this discussion:

I am happy to report that I requested a waiver for the requirement of submitting my dissertation to ProQuest. After reading my letter, the dean not only granted my request, but met with the university level graduate committee and they have now removed the ProQuest requirement for all students.

My main objection was that they were forcing the students into a commercial relationship with a third party (ProQuest) in order to graduate. Basically ProQuest offered the university a business deal with seemingly nice terms at the expense of the students, though I'm of the impression that the university never understood this. This type of arrangement was a little easier to swallow in the days of microfiche, which was much more difficult for the university to perform on its own. Commercial PDF archiving is unlikely to be a viable commercial model for the long term (I'm sure ProQuest is *very* aware of this).

Good luck to everyone still working on their dissertations 🙂 I'm now faced with the wholly different challenge of the clinic.
 
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