Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual

Cirasella , Jill, and Polly  Thistlethwaite. "Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual"  Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Implementation, edited by Kevin L. Smith and Katherine A. Dickson  (2017)(https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_pubs/286/). - Two chapters on dissertation anxiety from Smith and Dickson's 2017 book on open access are now freely available. Cirasella and Thistlethwaite wrote one; the other is “From Apprehension to Comprehension: Addressing Anxieties about Open Access to ETDs” by Kyle K. Courtney and Emily Kilcer. Both chapters do a good job of highlighting the many concerns that graduate students have about adding their dissertations to an institutional repository, and both suggest approaches that librarians can follow to try to assuage those fears. What we don't have yet is concrete data as to whether the potpourri of approaches that the authors suggest we try can effectively overcome the real, if often irrational, fears of graduate students. Given the concerns that all four authors have identified, it is likely that continuous education of graduate students from the moment they arrive on campus as well as education of their advisors, who were trained under a different scholarly communication environment, will be necessary. - PH