Giving Away Graduate Students’ Work

In recent days, there’s been some controversy over a new policy of the University of Iowa Libraries. They plan to start putting graduate student theses—dissertations, masters theses, and creative theses—online, freely available to anyone. Students have been legitimately concerned about work being published that is not yet polished. They are also worried that this form of publication might well preclude print publication, which means status, jobs, tenure, and money in the bank.
        This problem interests me particularly because I am one of the affected students. Despite the fact that my dissertation explores the role of gift economies in poetic production, I don’t want to give it away. I want a job, and a job means publication, and publishers don’t want to publish something that’s already available for free. Beyond this, I don’t like the fact that agency has been taken from me. Someone else is deciding to give away my work. Not only that, but they are asking me to sign away my publication rights. As UI Comm Studies professor Kembrew McCleod notes, this is not necessarily an infringement of my intellectual property rights “but it's more like coercion that is forcing students to sign away their publishing rights in order to graduate” (“Thesis policy sparks uproar” The Daily Iowan).
        I plan on saying more about this, from the perspective of my dissertation work, but this entry is all I have time for today.