26th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD2023_

Posted on May 20, 2023 by peter.suber's bookmarks

“The past decade has witnessed rapid development of various tools and techniques that are deployed in the effective and efficient management of ETDs. The Program Committee of the 26th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations, ETD 2023, invites you to submit your proposals for papers.

ETD 2023 is organized by the Information and Library Network Centre, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India during October 26-28, 2023. It will be an invaluable symposium for deliberations and exchange of ETD experiences from various parts of the world. It will also provide an opportunity to connect and understand best practices followed by professionals. The organizing committee welcomes proposals from libraries, library and information science professionals, students, faculty members, and all other interested parties. Organizing committee invites extended abstract form the interested professionals as per the guidelines….”

New national open access repository in Armenia | EIFL

Posted on April 28, 2023 by OATP primary

“With support from EIFL, the National Library of Armenia (NLA) has improved access to its digital materials – open access Armenian theses and dissertations, books and the Bulletin of Armenian Libraries – through the creation of a new repository.

The new repository, which uses DSpace 7.3 software, will be part of national open science infrastructure currently under development by the Ministry of Education and Science, which is also drafting a national open science policy….”

Open Access Policy of Central University of Haryana

Posted on February 9, 2023 by OATP primary

“It is advised that all the scholarly works produced by the University funds or by other public funds either at Central University of Haryana (CUH) or elsewhere with CUH affiliation are to be deposited in the University’s open access institutional digital repository i.e. Gyan Pravah…. The University shall also set up a central harvester** using the OAI-PMH to harvest the publications of CUH researchers, faculty and students from the World Wide Web for the wider accessibility of the shared resources…. It is advised that all the archives, current/ future scholarly and grey literature viz., research articles, popular articles, book chapters, books, monographs, catalogues, conference proceedings, success stories, case studies, project reports, class/lecture notes, presentation slides, photos, videos, speeches, keynote addresses, patent grant publications, data sets etc., produced by the University or by the faculty/researchers/ students with CUH affiliation are to be made available in CUH- IDR…. In case of any copyright/ intellectual property rights issue/s with the data, information, or materials to be patented or commercialized, or where the promulgations would infringe a legal commitment by the University and/or the author, such data, information, or materials may be exempted from this Policy. However, after an embargo period once they are available in public domain/ open sharing/ archiving, the work/s is/are to be made accessible to the public via CUH-IDR…. All institutional publications of the University, journal articles, educational resources (text-books), edited books, book chapters, working papers, policy briefs, memorial lectures, research datasets, scientific data, final reports of sponsored projects, conference/ seminar proceedings, conference reports, information bulletins, newsletters, annual reports, audited annual accounts (which can be made public), booklets, convocation souvenirs and any other documents of institutional importance are to be made available in the CUH-IDR…. Preferably, the institutional publications such as journals, text books, proceedings, etc. may be published with open licenses. The authors of the publications may retain copyright of the work/s. 1.7. The University’s open access contents/ documents shall be licensed for public use under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC-BY- NC-4.0) and the same shall be registered with SHERPA/ RoMEO database. The faculty members, researchers and students are advised to refer to SHERPA/ RoMEO to know about publishers’ policies on copyright and self-archiving…. All the faculty, researchers, and students are advised to use ‘Author’s Addendum’ at the time of acceptance and while signing the publishers’ copyright agreements mentioning the University’s Open Access Policy to deposit the publicly funded research outputs publicly available. Therefore, the publishers should allow the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript to be made available via CUH-IDR. And in case of any embargo, it should not be later than 6-8 months from publication date for making the deposits open to the public….”

Reconceptualizing Open Access to Theses and Dissertations | infojustice

Posted on January 25, 2023 by OATP primary

Abstract: Theses and dissertations (TD) are academic research projects that are conducted by graduate students to acquire a high academic degree, such as a PhD. The perception of the written TD has evolved over the years, following changes concerning the purpose of advanced academic studies. Today, these academic fruits should meet a high standard of academic innovation, which is understood broadly as encompassing not only knowledge concerning basic science but also the knowledge that generates social and economic value for society.

The modern perception of TD has generated a call for their greater accessibility, as part of the Open Science movement. Nevertheless, in many countries around the world TD are not published in an open access format. While the normative basis for open access approach to publicly funded academic research is extensively discussed in the literature, there is a lack of legal and normative discussion concerning the special case of TD. The present study aims at filling this gap.

We argue that the essence of TD as unique outputs of academic research merits a special stance compelling the publication of these studies in open access format, subject to certain exceptions. This stance is underpinned by several arguments, which we develop in our study, based on historic and normative analysis. Moreover, we propose to establish a mandatory global policy and standardization regarding the publication of TD in designated repositories, open to the public, that would generate together an “open world wide web of TD.” Such a global framework will facilitate the progress of science and promote the public good worldwide.

Indonesian research access: quantity over quality?

Posted on December 22, 2022 by OATP primary

“Prior to the open access movement and the proliferation of the internet, almost all Indonesian higher education institutions made thesis and dissertation collections closed, accessible only with certain permissions….

Prior to the open access movement and the proliferation of the internet, almost all Indonesian higher education institutions made thesis and dissertation collections closed, accessible only with certain permissions….

The lack of selection process and quality control for the scholarly resources uploaded to the institutional repositories had led to some unhelpful material making it way into them: documents with supervisor’s comments still visible; documents that were compressed or password protected; documents that were uploaded as multiple image files; documents that were available only partially; and so on….

When quantity trumps quality, the repositories become less effective as a means of disseminating scholarly works….”

Open science and research | Uniarts Helsinki

Posted on November 10, 2022 by peter.suber's bookmarks

“The Uniarts Helsinki Open Access policy describes the general principles of publishing. The policy applies to researchers, staff and students working at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Publications of the University of the Arts Helsinki are typically both artistic and scientific in nature.

We follow the guidelines on responsible conduct of research determined by the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK) in the publishing and openness of our research results.
Uniarts Helsinki requires open access publishing when possible.
Uniarts supports publishing in Gold open access publication channels through a centralized APC fund, subject to specified criteria.
Uniarts recommends the use of Creative Commons licences in publishing text-based research outputs. If the research funder is the Academy of Finland or the European Commission, CC BY 4.0 should be used. When publishing with open licenses, the author(s) retains the copyright.
Uniarts recommends that researchers register their ORCID iD and add it to their publication data.
Uniarts requires that researchers self-archive their scientific and peer-reviewed research publications when allowed by the publisher. Uniarts recommends researchers to upload the Final Draft (Author Accepted Manuscript, AAM) or the Publisher’s PDF to Uniarts Helsinki’s institutional repository. Artistic research publications or their parts are linked to the metadata in the repository.
The author is responsible for evaluating the quality and responsibility of the publication channel they have chosen to publish in.
The theses of master’s, licentiate’s and doctoral (both scientific and artistic) degrees are published, as appropriate, in Uniarts Helsinki’s open institutional repository Taju and also for example in Research Catalogue.
Training, support and guidance is provided for open access publishing.
The progress of open access publishing is monitored at Uniarts through the strategic goals of research….”

Seeking Stories: Open Access Dissertations, Theses and Reports | College of Computing Advising

Posted on September 9, 2022 by peter.suber's bookmarks

“The Graduate School and J. Robert Van Pelt and John and Ruanne Opie Library are celebrating Open Access Week 2022 by highlighting 10 years of Michigan Tech graduate student scholars sharing their work on Digital Commons @ Michigan Tech. Digital Commons is the University’s institutional repository. We want to include you in the celebration!

Publishing open access helps scholars access your work and share the results of your research globally. We can see how this process happens through the usage statistics available from the Digital Commons platform and the PlumX dashboard embedded in individual submissions. We can’t wait to share our findings!

We also want to hear from you. Do you have an open access story to share about your student’s work or an interesting connection you have made? We’re gathering photos and stories to share with the campus. Please share your photos (JPG and PNG) and stories by Friday (Sept. 9) with gradschool@mtu.edu to be included in our celebration of graduate student scholars at Michigan Tech….”

DOIs for Theses survey | UK DataCite Consortium

Posted on August 5, 2022 by OATP primary

The British Library, as Lead of the UK DataCite Consortium, is looking into collaborating further with UK universities, with the aim of restarting earlier work on developing good practice in use of DataCite DOIs for theses. We would appreciate it if you could complete this survey and with your insight help us meet the needs of the HE institutions and researchers.

The UK DataCite Consortium was established in 2010. Over the years, we have grown to over 100 consortium organisations in the UK and abroad. In the past year we have been working alongside DataCite on a new membership model which includes a lower membership fee.

Additionally, the DataCite Metadata Schema (version 4.4. – https://schema.datacite.org/meta/kernel-4.4/) was recently updated with important additions, something which could further positively impact our capacity to attract new clients. In the past, when research organisations mainly wanted to mint DOIs for journal articles we advised them that CrossRef was more suitable. However, with new changes to the Metadata Schema, this no longer applies. As DataCite explained: “this release of the Metadata Schema contains better support for textual publications. Important changes are the addition of specific resource types such as journal, journal article, dissertation, etc., and also includes computational notebook and peer review, so that these types can be better identified.”

All responses are anonymous and email addresses will be separated from the results before any further analysis or processing takes place. We will hold your email address on a separate list used only to contact you about our current work regarding Persistent Identifiers for theses, and will destroy this list when that work is complete; you may opt out at any time. For the purposes of data protection, we will process this in the legitimate interest of delivering and improving the DataCite service in the UK, in line with Article 6(1)(f) of the GDPR.

Copyright: for learning, teaching, and research ( A guide) | Library & Cultural Services at University of Essex

Posted on July 22, 2022 by OATP primary

Copyright is relevant whenever you are copying or sharing creative work. This includes publishing academic works, creating educational resources, uploading a thesis to the Repository, sharing images online, and more. This guide helps you to understand copyright and its relevance to your work and study at the University of Essex.

ETD 2022 – 25th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations – ETD 2022, Novi Sad, Serbia

Posted on July 14, 2022 by OATP primary

“The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), invites you to attend the 25th International Symposium of Theses and Dissertations, ETD 2022.

ETD 2022 held in Novi Sad, Serbia, from 07 to 09 September, is hosted by University of Novi Sad (http://www.uns.ac.rs/), and co-organized by non-profit organizations Science 2.0 Alliance (http://sci2zero.org/) and NTLTD (http://www.ndltd.org/). It will be an excellent opportunity to exchange ETD experiences with professionals from different countries, to discuss innovative projects and initiatives and to share successful experiences and up-to-date practices, and to network with colleagues and friends from all over the world. Safety of the participants is the top priority for the organizers and we keep one eye on the COVID pandemic and war in Ukraine.

The conference theme is “FAIRness of ETDs and its implications”. We hope the conference will raise a fruitful discussion on importance of application of FAIR principles at ETDs and supplement materials. We aim to address topics such as:

FAIRness of ETDs and supplement materials;
ETD and OpenScience;
ETDs and research data;
ETDs and source code; …”

Thousands of older dissertations from UCSF newly available in eScholarship – California Digital Library

Posted on July 13, 2022 by OATP primary

“Over three thousand dissertations and theses digitized from UCSF’s archives, originally submitted to the university between 1965 and 2006, were added to eScholarship this year. These titles cover topics as disparate as the pregnancy experiences of black women, AIDS and identity in the gay press of the 1980s, and models for examining the clearance of drugs from the liver. Before the project was undertaken to add these dissertations and theses to eScholarship, accessing them was challenging: you may have been able to find one in a database if you were at a subscribing institution, but if the title was old enough, your only option might have been to travel to California and visit a library storage facility.

This is the case with dissertation literature around the world, especially older dissertations. Unique work produced by graduate students at thousands of academic institutions, representing their intellectual labor and that of their advisors and committees, sits behind paywalls or worse. As a result, researchers are often thwarted in trying to track down a citation to what sounds like the perfect source for their own studies….

Newer dissertations and theses — going back to 2007 — had been submitted electronically and were already available in eScholarship. Making older works available, however, proved complex. Even though the volumes had already been scanned as part of UC’s work with the Google Books project and the HathiTrust Digital Library, many questions remained. What permissions did students grant the university when they filed their dissertation paperwork? How could the image files generated by the scanning process be converted to document files for eScholarship? Where would the record data come from, so that each document’s title and author displayed properly? Answering these questions and several more required the expertise of numerous people at UCSF and the California Digital Library….”

Full article: Born Accessible: Creating Templates for Standardized, Accessible ETDs

Posted on June 2, 2022 by OATP primary

Abstract: At the University of Southern Indiana (USI), graduate programs primarily produce physical theses and capstones. As programs expand online options, the need for electronic dissertations and theses grows. The institutional repository offered a chance for the library to collaborate with graduate studies and teaching program faculty to develop templates that would streamline workflows and improve document accessibility. Templates were created for doctor of education dissertations in APA style, along with master theses in APA, MLA, and Chicago styles that could serve multiple programs. This presentation outlined the process of working with campus stakeholders to develop the templates, as well as the steps taken to ensure accessibility of both the template and final dissertation or thesis. Presentation resources and electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) templates are available for download at http://bit.ly/born_accessible.

Born Accessible: Creating Templates for Standardized, Accessible ETDs: The Serials Librarian: Vol 0, No 0

Posted on April 7, 2022 by peter.suber's bookmarks

Dissertating in Public | hc:45003 | Humanities CORE

Posted on March 20, 2022 by OATP primary

Abstract: Kathleen Fitzpatrick analyses the sudden isolation graduate students find themselves in during the dissertation process. In the humanities, she observes, graduate students are regularly habituated into an anxiety of intellectual independence whereby sharing ideas, collaboration and publishing work in progress is to be considered suspect and potentially diminishing scholarly value. Digital scholarship, she argues, can eliminate or at least sideline such anxieties (and their untimeliness) by creating a participating public, testing ideas, interesting possible publishers early and creating a community of scholarship that, together with the support of PhD-granting institutions, endorses ‘new kinds of open work’.

UC Davis Contacts Alumni Authors in Successful Project to Open Theses and Dissertations for Worldwide Access – California Digital Library

Posted on February 2, 2022 by OATP primary

“From January to September 2021, Sara Gunasekara of the UC Davis Archives and Special Collections Department, headed by Kevin Miller, undertook a project to expand access to UC Davis theses and dissertations digitized by Google and deposited in HathiTrust. Per copyright law, access to these volumes was restricted, based on their date of “publication.” Sara’s strategy for overcoming this barrier was to contact these alumni authors, asking them to submit a Rights Holder Creative Commons Declaration Form to HathiTrust, in order to have a Creative Commons License applied to their works. As a result, 1,047 UC Davis theses and dissertations were opened for worldwide access, to date, in HathiTrust.

In all, nearly 24,000 UC Davis theses and dissertations (published from 1923 – 2010, with the physical volumes stored at UC’s Northern Regional Library Facility [NRLF]) were digitized by Google in 2017 as part of the Google Library Project. The resulting scans were uploaded to both HathiTrust and Google Books. UC has also partnered with Google to digitize dissertations and theses from UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and UCSF, all of which are also in HathiTrust, which means that UC Davis’ model could be used by these campuses as well – given staff availability.

The UC Davis Archives and Special Collections team had long wanted to conduct an outreach effort to open theses and dissertations in HathiTrust, but did not have the bandwidth until the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything. In the past, the team reached out to an author only when their thesis or dissertation was requested through interlibrary loan. This process had introduced them to the challenges and rewards of tracking down and contacting alumni authors, so the team knew what a larger scale project would entail. Then working from home actually provided the opportunity required for such an initiative.”

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