Breaking the Embargo

By Carl Straumsheim. As doctoral students of history urge their departments to allow more experimental types of dissertations, the desire for free flow of information between scholars may end up trumping the need to keep the research embargoed. A roundtable session on the “digitally informed dissertation” during the American Historical Association's annual meeting here on Thursday brought together two current and two recent doctoral students who used digital tools to aid their projects, but the discussion quickly turned to reconciling the differences between the scholars’ views on sharing and the host organization’s stance on promoting the right to keep digital version of their research embargoed. In a policy introduced last July, the AHA recommended doctoral students be allowed to place their dissertations under embargoes lasting as long as six year. Read more...