dissertations and electronic publishing

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,
  Thanks to Virginia, Maaike, Mick, Fred, Frank, Jeffrey, and Sabine for
commenting on the important issue of publication of dissertations in child
language.  I am happy to see that Maaike and Frank are providing this
excellent outlet for dissertation work in child language.  Of course, not all
dissertations can be effectively compressed into 30 pages.  I think back to
my own monstrously huge dissertation of 879 pages on Hungarian language
acquisition which was never published for the obvious reason.
  Virginia is right that psychologists prefer articles over books and
linguists think the other way.  What is important is that PhD students fully
understand the range of options available to them for publication.  It is
true that Kluwer dissertations are priced for libraries, not individuals, but
having access to dissertations in libraries is still a win for both writers
and readers, even if the royalty is a joke.  Another press that has done a
lot of dissertation publishing is Gardner, although I can't think of any
dissertations in the area of child language development from Gardner.
  Regarding Sabine's question, I am not aware of a requirement for
publication at any North American institution.  However, some psychology
departments will allow a graduate student to use a set of two or three
important article-length publications to replace the dissertation
requirement.  Few students take advantage of this option, however.
  Jeffrey Anderson is, of course, right in suggesting that the future of
publishing is on the net.  For some promising achievements in this area, you
may be interested in examining the Cognitive Sciences Eprint Archive
organized by Steven Harnad at http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/
  I would also be willing to set up an archive of papers in child language or
make pointers to Jeffrey Anderson's archive.  However, perhaps the Harnad
site works well enough for this purpose.

--Brian MacWhinney