Electronic Publication of Theses

I just chanced upon your article on electronic posting of dissertations (P. Gwynne, The Scientist, 11[21]:1, Oct. 27, 1997). As we are embarking on a similar project at the Université de Montréal, I was much interested in it. The points of view that you reflected were quite amusing. C. Robert Phillips' attitude was particularly funny as he only saw the ease to copy digital documents, but [he] missed the fact that computers offer immense text retrieval abilities so that plagiarisms would actually be easier to detect with digitized documents than without.

UMI's attitude is also quite funny, as [the company formerly known as University Microfilms Inc.] downplay[s] a situation that may easily wipe [it] out within a few years. As for the ACS [American Chemical Society], how can they claim that a thesis has not passed peer review? What is a jury about, if it is not peer...