In an earlier post, I wrote about the University of Iowa deciding whether to offer manuscripts over the internet. Well, they came to their senses and decided not to do it.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The University of Iowa has backtracked on a plan to post all graduate students’ theses online and make them freely available to the public. The reversal came in response to vigorous protests last week from students in the university’s prestigious graduate program in writing, who said that the plan could threaten the commercial value of their novels, plays, and other creative works.

Lola L. Lopes, the interim provost of the university, announced on Monday that the institution won’t publish theses from students in the writing programs as open-access documents. The decision affects students who will earn master-of-fine-arts degrees in Iowa’s wide-ranging graduate writing concentrations in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, playwriting, and translation.

“It was only a germ of a thought to begin with,” Ms. Lopes said in an interview. “And we have squelched it.”