Here's an excerpt:

An increasing number of higher education institutions worldwide are requiring submission of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) by graduate students and are subsequently providing open access to these works in online repositories. Faculty advisors and graduate students are concerned that such unfiltered access to their work could diminish future publishing opportunities. This study investigated social sciences, arts and humanities journal editors' and university press directors' attitudes toward ETDs. The findings indicate that manuscripts which are revisions of openly accessible ETDs are always welcome for submission or considered on a case by case basis by 82.8% of journal editors and 53.7% of university press directors polled.

| Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of the 2012 Canadian IR/ETD Survey was two-fold. The first was to show the growth of Institutional Repositories (IRs) across Canada. The second was to illustrate the state of the electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) submission programs at Canadian institutions granting graduate degrees, where a thesis or dissertation is a requirement for graduation.

| Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

| Digital Scholarship's Digital/Print Books | Digital Scholarship |

The Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 is available as a $9.95 paperback (ISBN: 146377429X) and an open access PDF file. All versions of the bibliography are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

For further information about Digital Scholarship publications, see the "Digital Scholarship Publications Overview" and "Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications."

| Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt:

These case studies form part of the ‘Influencing the Deposit of Electronic Theses in UK HE' project, commissioned by the JISC and led by UCL. They were designed to explore the practicalities of introducing and administering an institutional e-thesis mandate, and to draw out the benefits and challenges of mandates for the institutions that adopt them.

Each of the four institutions who made up the case studies was chosen because they offered a glimpse into the reality of a mandate at every stage.

• The University of Sussex has just introduced a mandate, and staff there offered the benefit of their experiences of creating the systems and processes that support the new policy.
• Aberystwyth University spent some time exploring what kind of mandate would be most effective, and their story shows how to get the best from the consultation process.
• Brunel University has been developing its e-theses collection since 2006, and has been reaping the rewards, both in terms of research impact and benefits to scholarship.
• The University of Glasgow was one of the earliest adopters of e-theses in the UK and its work showcases a mature service that is very much a part of the institution.

Each of these institutions had experiences in common, and each faced similar questions from students and supervisors. In highlighting different aspects of best practice in each case study, the aim is to demonstrate an effective approach to meeting the challenges of e-theses. While these challenges can seem daunting, these case studies show that they can be overcome by a combination of communication, education and balanced policies.

| Digital Scholarship |

Here's some representative presentations:

• Directions for Digital Repositories, Leslie Carr
• Preservation Network at TDL, Peter Nürnberg
• Texas Digital Library Update 2010, Mark McFarland and John Leggett
• Texas Learning Object Repository, Junius Rowland and Otto Fox
• Vireo ETD Submission and Management System—Update 2010, Peter Nürnberg

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Rutgers University Libraries are pleased to announce the availability of OpenETD, a web-based software application for managing the submission, approval, and distribution of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). OpenETD is the open source release of the Rutgers University Libraries. RUetd application and will be maintained on the RUetd annual release schedule. Releases will include fixes for known problems and recommendations for enhancements received from internal projects and the user community at large.

OpenETD can be used as either a standalone ETD submission system, or it can be implemented as a component of an institutional repository by using its METS/XML export functionality. Using the METS/XML export functionality, native to OpenETD, implementers can export acquired ETDs to their local institutional repositories for preservation and presentation purposes.

Features of OpenETD include:

• UTF-8 Compliant

  UTF-8 compliance ensures that diacritics, foreign languages, mathematical symbols, and other characters will be preserved in the metadata and abstract.

• Support of multiple graduate schools

  Large universities often have several graduate schools. OpenETD provides a centralized system for managing submissions from a System Administrator perspective while also limiting Reviewers' access to only their schools. OpenETD also allows schools to have their own unique degree types, program/curriculums, and submission terms and policies and embargo period(s).

• Site configuration

  Configurable unique title, logo, color scheme and footer information for the entire university or for each graduate school.

• Local or Centralized Authentication

  Configurable authentication module to use a centralized LDAP system or local system, or both. LDAP support is limited in release 1.1-beta of the software.

• Support of supplementary files.

  The ETDs often have supporting materials, all with unique metadata. Restrictions may be applied to acceptable filetypes.

• Automated Margin and Page Number Validator

  No more rulers! Reviewers can check margins and page numbers on PDF documents with this handy tool.

• Email Notification System

  Users are notified when the status of their paper changes. Reviewers are notified upon submission and resubmission. Email notifications may be turned off.

• Graduation Report

  Generate an Excel compatible report of all students with accepted papers for a given semester. This is useful for graduation role call, or the printing of name tags, letters, etc.

• Semi-Automated Export to ProQuest/UMI

  Export tools generate metadata and zip files of "accepted" ETDs for easy FTP upload to ProQuest's ETD processing facility.

• Export in METS/XML

  Export tools allow for the generation of METS/XML from submitted papers.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The NDLTD, OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), VTLS and Scirus maintain and provide access related to the NDLTD Union Catalog of ETDs available in institutional repositories around the globe.

The NDLTD is an international non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the creation, dissemination, use, adoption, and preservation of digital theses and dissertations. The NDLTD assists students and universities in using electronic publishing and digital libraries to more effectively share knowledge in order to unlock potential benefits worldwide. The NDLTD also promotes student efforts to transform the genre of the print dissertation through the use of innovative software to create cutting edge hypertext/multimedia ETDs.

The NDLTD is comprised of many individual member institutions and consortia, each of which has or plans to put in place a process for archiving and distributing ETDs; others are welcome to join if they have similar interest. The Union Catalog Project is an attempt to make these individual collections appear as one seamless digital library of ETDs to students and researchers seeking out theses and dissertations.

In 1997 the first ETD program requirement was instituted at Virginia Tech. Over the course of thirteen years ETD programs have now been implemented in thousands of colleges and universities around the world. The one millionth ETD milestone indicates that ETD implementation is beginning to reach a critical mass. Indeed, in January, the count exceeded 800K records, while as of April 19, the record count reached 1.6 million, though there may be some duplicate records.

In the higher-GDP countries, institutions are rapidly adopting ETDs on a per-institutional or state-wide basis. Many lower-GDP countries are adopting ETDs at a national level as one means of jump-starting and disseminating research and development activities. The NDLTD anticipates that the number of ETDs worldwide will increase rapidly as more schools in every region around the globe implement ETD programs.. . .

Many institutions around the world are represented in the NDLTD Union Catalog. Universities can participate by implementing the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to contribute metadata records to the union catalog. The NDLTD provides free resources to implement OAI-PMH in an institutional repository.

Here's an excerpt:

Most of the Stanford graduate students who uploaded their dissertations—47 out of 60—chose to display their dissertations in their entirety.

Most of the students—52 out of 60—selected the "attribution non-commercial" license from Creative Commons. . . .

More than half of the doctoral students—36 out of 60—chose to release their dissertation immediately. Ten of them chose to delay the release for six months; nine chose a one-year embargo; five chose a two-year delay.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Speaking at the Oct. 22 Faculty Senate meeting, University Librarian Michael Keller said the digital world offers a "much greater palette of expression" to graduate students, because they will be able to include more graphics, color and character sets in their dissertations than in paper copies.

"[There will be] more opportunities to link to online resources and to have those links live," Keller said during a joint presentation on the program with University Registrar Thomas Black.

The program is the result of a yearlong collaboration between Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources and the Registrar's Office.

Under the program, digital dissertations will be stored in the Stanford Digital Repository, which provides preservation services for scholarly resources, helping to ensure their integrity, authenticity and usability over time.

Keller said the documents will be available to the Stanford community through Socrates, the university's online library catalog, and "available to the world" through Google, which will serve as a third-party distributor. He said the library will print one copy of each work and store it in the Stanford University Archives.

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ICE-TheOREM was a project which made several important contributions to the repository domain, promoting deposit by integrating the repository with authoring workflows and enhancing open access by prototyping new infrastructure to allow fine-grained embargo management within an institution without impacting on existing open access repository infrastructure.

In the area of scholarly communications workflows, the project produced a complete end-to-end demonstration of eScholarship for word processor users, with tools for authoring, managing and disseminating semantically-rich ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) documents fully integrated with supporting data. This work is focused on theses, as it is well understood that early career researchers are the most likely to lead the charge in new innovations in scholarly publishing and dissemination models.

The authoring tools are built on the ICE content management system, which allows authors to work within a word processing system (as most authors do) with easy-to-use toolbars to structure and format their documents. The ICE system manages both small data files and links to larger data sets. The result is research publications which are available not just as paper-ready PDF files but as fully interactive semantically aware web documents which can be disseminated via repository software such as ePrints, DSpace and Fedora as complete supported web-native and PDF publications.

Here's an excerpt:

A growing number of universities are beginning to require the digital deposit of their thesis and dissertation output in their institutional repositories. At the same time, a growing number of universities as well as research funders are beginning to mandate that all refereed research must be deposited too. This makes for a timely synergy between the practices of the younger and older generation of researchers as the Open Access era unfolds. It also maximizes the uptake, usage and impact of university research input at all stages, as well as providing rich and powerful new metrics to monitor and reward research productivity and impact. It is important to integrate universities' ETD and research output repositories, mandates and metrics as well as to provide the mechanism for those deposits that may need to be made Closed Access rather than Open Access: Repositories need to implement the "email eprint request" Button for all Closed Access Deposits. Any would-be user webwide, having reached the metadata of a Closed Access Deposit can, with one click, request an eprint for research purposes; the author instantly receives an automatic email and can then, again with one click, authorize the automatic emailing of one copy to the user by the repository software. This feature is important for fulfilling immediate research usage needs during any journal-article embargo period, and it also gives the authors of dissertations they hope to publish as books a way to control who has access to the dissertation. Digital dissertations will also benefit from the reference-linking and book-citation metrics that will be provided by harvesters of the distributed institutional repository metadata (which will also include the metadata and reference lists of all university book output). Dissertation downloads as well as eprint-requests will also provide useful new research impact metrics

Here's an excerpt:

Assuming that you have the resources to support ICE, which I’ll cover below there are a few reasons why an institution might want to use it for theses specifically.

• It provides a well tested general purpose way to design templates, with a standard set of style names, so even if none of the other features appeal ICE templates might. . . .

• You can present theses in HTML as well as PDF. . . .

  It is possible to deposit from ICE into a repository via SWORD APP; we have plugins for ePrints and Fedora only at the moment, not for Dspace which is what they use at ANU.

• It provides annotation services . . . If you are running ICE either from a desktop or the server version then you can collaborate via paragraph-level annotations, but at the moment we don’t have a way to do the workflow that would be required to allow examiners to do this. . . .

• You can integrate data into a document via links, making it Linked Data – at least, we have proved the concept on the ICE-TheOREM project, but this would need to be worked out discipline by discipline.

Here's an excerpt:

One of the areas highlighted for potential investigation was the use of Web Services in supporting the delivery of EThOS. Due to staff changes following the start of the project it was not possible to carry out this investigation on the technical level that had been originally hoped. Nevertheless, an initial investigation was carried out to assess options. In considering the role of Web Services in supporting EThOS, it was concluded that it was not possible for the most part to consider the needs of EThOS alone, as using Web Services is primarily about communication between systems. EThOS has been developed on a model of ongoing interaction with institutional repositories, and as such the role of Web Services in supporting these local repository instances is key to the success of EThOS making use of them. Furthermore, given the development of local repositories as systems that need to interact with other systems, either within an institution or outside it, it seemed timely to address this issue to provide guidance to the community as a whole.

A workshop to investigate the potential value and use of Web Services to digital repositories was thus organised to both disseminate and capture information on the possibilities. This report summarises much of the information and conclusions from the workshop, and accompanies the full resources from the day available at http://www.ethos.ac.uk/0031_Web_Services_Day.html.