When I finished my PhD at Northwestern, part of the university's procedure involved going to the ProQuest Web site. ProQuest is a journal and dissertation publishing company.
They asked if I wanted my dissertation to be available, free of charge, to anyone interested in reading it.
Clicking on "yes, I want to make it available for free" would cost me something like $800.
Clicking on "no, I'll let you charge people to see it" would cost me nothing.
Having just finished, and being in debt to do so, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I wasn't rushing to pay even more. So now, if people want to see my dissertation, they have to pay -- or be part of an institution that pays an annual fee to ProQuest. (BTW, e-mail me if you want a copy.)
My guess is that it's similar with other journals. And while professors have more than PhD students, they have limited enough research funds that they'll hold their nose, save the money, and keep things behind a paywall.
Which is totally outrageous. It's about time that this change, and I'm happy to see what looks like the beginning of the end on this front.
There is an alternative: you host your thesis (and/or papers) on your own website, or you put them on arXiv.org. It's called self-archiving and it's allowed by most publishers. Funny thing is: making your papers available for free also increases the number of citations, something academics really care about.
And another alternative at some universities is the university thesis open archive itself. In Northern Europe I'm told some universities won't even give you your diploma if you don't upload your thesis in their open archive.
Frankly, every university in the world should have an open archive for thesis (and mutualized is even better). It's just the continuation of keeping thesis copies at the university library.
There's nothing that stops you from uploading the PDF elsewhere, right? Why not just push the file to some free hosting service (or even GitHub in a GitHub Pages repo)?
They asked if I wanted my dissertation to be available, free of charge, to anyone interested in reading it.
Clicking on "yes, I want to make it available for free" would cost me something like $800.
Clicking on "no, I'll let you charge people to see it" would cost me nothing.
Having just finished, and being in debt to do so, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I wasn't rushing to pay even more. So now, if people want to see my dissertation, they have to pay -- or be part of an institution that pays an annual fee to ProQuest. (BTW, e-mail me if you want a copy.)
My guess is that it's similar with other journals. And while professors have more than PhD students, they have limited enough research funds that they'll hold their nose, save the money, and keep things behind a paywall.
Which is totally outrageous. It's about time that this change, and I'm happy to see what looks like the beginning of the end on this front.