Mandatory Open Access Publishing for Electronic Theses and Dissertations: Ethics and Enthusiasm

This article argues against policies that require students to submit theses and dissertations to electronic institutional repositories. The article counters a variety of arguments often used to justify this practice. In addition, the article reports on the results of an examination of electronic thesis and dissertation policies at more than 150 university libraries and graduate schools, offering a system of criteria and scoring for ranking these policies according to their respect for student copyright and intellectual property.