Sharing Michigan Research with the World

University of Michigan Ph.D. candidates produce about 1,000 new dissertations annually—deep research that can help a broad range of future readers from academia and beyond. But many U-M dissertations remain difficult to access online.

The Unlocking Dissertations Project, a partnership between the University of Michigan Library and Rackham Graduate School, is working to change that by turning 150 years of graduate scholarship into an open, usable, and measurable public resource. The project is part of the university’s celebration of 150 years of doctoral education at Michigan.

As the first U-M doctoral degree was awarded in 1876, dissertations at U-M long predate the internet. Dissertations became fully digital around 2007 to 2009. Since then, Rackham students have had the option to place a limited embargo on their dissertations, which restricts access for a set period of time. This may be a good option for students who need to protect their intellectual property during the patent application process, maintain confidentiality agreements that protect third-party proprietary information, plan to publish their dissertation as a book, or who need to protect research sources at risk of identity exposure. 

For students who completed their dissertations before digitization, those works were typically submitted in hard copy. Digitization takes time and resources, and it also requires attention to accessibility so the content is usable for readers with disabilities.

Today, the University of Michigan Library holds about 47,000 dissertations, but only 23,000 are fully available to the public online. Roughly 24,000 dissertations are restricted, meaning anyone can view the title and record, but the full text is limited to people using U-M internet addresses or signed in with a U-M account.

“Students retain copyright in and ownership of their work produced in their role as students, so the U-M Library needs a clear reason to make older dissertations fully public,” says Data Curation Specialist for Humanities and Social Sciences Rachel Woodbrook.

Woodbrook notes that, in many cases, works published before 1978 enter the public domain 95 years after publication. Authors of dissertations completed between 1979 and 2006 (before campuswide digital submission became common), can help expand access by contacting the University of Michigan Library to request that their dissertation be made publicly available.

Woodbrook says restricted dissertations are requested frequently—and that U-M alums are eager to unlock their work when they know there’s a request. “Anecdotally, the majority of authors we hear back from are not only willing to open their work but also excited that it is still of interest,” she says.

Even before everything is unlocked, usage data shows that dissertations are among U-M’s most widely used research resources beyond campus.

Charles Watkinson, the director of the University of Michigan Press and associate university librarian for publishing, says the project is building a “dynamic, accessible, and measurable global resource,” and early results show U-M dissertations are “among the university’s most powerful tools for global impact.”

Project tracking has found the following:

• Eighty-nine percent of dissertation views come from outside the U-M campus.
• Dissertations reached 2.3 million active users in about 200 countries and territories over the last three years.
• Low- and middle-income countries account for roughly 23 percent of all downloads, supporting researchers in places where paid databases may be out of reach.
• Impact is also local: Engagement is strong across Michigan, with major use in Detroit and other cities such as Grand Rapids, Lansing, and Kalamazoo.

When dissertations are available, people use them—worldwide and in Michigan.

The project also focuses on making dissertations usable for everyone, including readers with disabilities. Many older digitized dissertations exist as PDFs that are difficult or impossible to use with screen readers and other assistive technologies.

Watkinson emphasizes that “opening access is just the start, because the goal is to make dissertations accessible to all users, including those with print disabilities or different learning preferences.”

Support for the Unlocking Dissertations Project advances the University of Michigan Library Dissertation Accessibility Fund, including:

• ADA-compliance remediation, such as converting older PDFs into formats readable with assistive technology (estimated at about $250 per dissertation)
• metadata enrichment, so dissertations are easier to discover through search engines such as Google
• rights review and outreach, to help move dissertations from U-M-only access to open access

This project honors the work U-M graduate students created—and helps ensure it can continue to matter. As Watkinson puts it, a gift to the fund helps ensure “the years of labor and mentorship behind every U-M dissertation can continue to inform new scholarship and shape public policy worldwide.”

Unlocking dissertations means more people can learn from U-M research, more communities can benefit from it, and more readers—including those who need accessible formats—can fully use it.

Unlock your dissertation by following these instructions from Deep Blue.
Make a gift to the Unlocking Dissertations Project.