ABSTRACT
The recent interest in digital technology has inspired a number of projects to explore the publication of Master’s theses and Ph.D. dissertations in digital format. I will not examine each of those efforts in detail. Rather, my purpose here is to briefly critique some of their claims and then to present a position on digital publishing based on empirical evidence and users’ needs. To do so, it is necessary to first place the idea of digital publication in a broader context. These projects often appear in discussions of the development of digital libraries as the sites from which scholarly communication is conducted. I shall first conduct a cursory overview of that context and then look more closely into some of those publishing projects.
