Wellcome Library Moving Image and Sound Collection, (http://wellcomelibrary.org/about-us/about-the-collections/moving-image-and-sound-collection/)

Dissertation Reviews aims to help the early career academic make the leap from dissertation to book, with private comments, while publicising the research and topic in a non-critical manner in public. It puts the early career academic’s work out there, but allows it to bypass a potentially scathing review in a journal. Dissertation Reviews is a sign of the times, a response to trends in early academic careers, and its a curious one, given that it is committing to avoid criticism and offer tips only privately at the same time that others are experimenting with open peer review models and highly public assessments of research. Will Dissertation Reviews help the early careerist? We can only speculate at this early stage of the project, and since the really constructive comments are private, we can only really speculate on the benefits of what we see: the non-critical synopses. There probably is value in being selected for review, and in having someone else publicise your work. Dissertation Reviews claims that their new posts can garner some 300 page views in the first week, which is impressive when you consider how specialised many of the topics are. The site notes that it hopes to help panel chairs find presenters for conferences, which would be a boon to panel chairs as well as early career academics. But as the site grows it will need a much more extensive and thought-out tagging system to improve discoverability of particular articles. One place where Dissertation Reviews, or projects like it, could have an impact is on the phenomenon described by a graduate student’s remarks to the American Historical Association’s Committee on Graduate Education, and reported in the committee’s The Education of Historians for the Twenty-first Century: the pressure to publish, this student noted, can ‘lead. . . to a situation where [dissertation] topics that might have been more original in design become more conventional in order to survive’. A middle ground, such as Dissertation Reviews, between the dissertation committee and publication could offer hope to students faced with this choice. If those students see a stopping-off place after the PhD, but before the long slog to a monograph, they might see that there’s an option between getting something out into publication now versus taking time to develop a new interpretation or explore new archives. Fewer ‘conventional’ dissertations could be the result. And perhaps the nagging knowledge that one’s dissertation will live on in a database, flaws and all, may be tempered by the knowledge that it will also have a life in a non-critical and supportive review.