And Congratulations.

Yes, I had to pay. It was simply part of the ProQuest forms. When I turned my Master’s thesis in after final committee approval, it went two places. One copy went to the school library for permanent archiving and another copy was sent to UMI/ProQuest. The paperwork for ProQuest basically defaulted to “Pay us X dollars for archiving your thesis” as a standard fee and they also registered my copyright for the thesis. The fee for this was $65.

ProQuest had additional options with this, such as ProQuest providing bound copies for personal use (which I used lulu.com for instead). On this form, there was a checkbox for making the electronic copies of the thesis available from their index for free but I had to pay for this. Otherwise, people have to pay them for any access to my thesis. As I recall, the justification was that they have to host the file and make it available on their site. This is officially called “Open Access” by ProQuest, as opposed to the term “Traditional Publishing.” This is an additional $95 fee on top of the $65 for archiving and copyright registration.

I mentioned this last December when I was doing the paperwork.

As a librarian, I’m interested that *you* had to pay PQ to make it available for free. Can you tell me more about that?