"Opening the Dissertation: Overcoming Cultural Calcification and Agoraphobia"

Denise Troll Covey has published "Opening the Dissertation: Overcoming Cultural Calcification and Agoraphobia" in tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society.

Here's an excerpt:

This article places the struggle to open access to the dissertation in the context of the crisis in doctoral education and the transition from print to digital literacy. It explores the underlying cultural calcification and agoraphobia that deter engagement with openness. Solving the problems will require overhauling the curriculum and conventions of doctoral education. Opening access to dissertations is an important first step, but insufficient to end the crisis. Only opening other dimensions of the dissertation — the structure, media, notion of authorship, and methods of assessment — can foster the digital literacy needed to save PhD programs from extinction. If higher education institutions invested heavily in remedying obsolete practices, the remedies would reverberate throughout the academy, accelerate advancement in the disciplines, and revolutionize scholarly publishing. The article ends with a discussion of the significant role librarians could play in facilitating needed changes given appropriate institutional commitment.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

"American ETD Dissemination in the Age of Open Access: ProQuest, NoQuest, or Allowing Student Choice"

Gail P. Clement has published "American ETD Dissemination in the Age of Open Access: ProQuest, NoQuest, or Allowing Student Choice" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

A stark incongruity in the treatment of academic scholarship persists on many U.S. campuses today. Faculty authors are generally free to publish in whatever vehicle suits their needs and goals, while also expected (or mandated) to deposit their works in the open access university repository. By contrast, graduate students typically must send their scholarship to a single commercial publisher for toll-access, while also required to submit their works to the university repository.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

"Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Sciences?"

College & Research Libraries has released a preprint of "Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Sciences?"

Here's an excerpt:

In academia, there is a growing acceptance of sharing the final electronic version of graduate work, such as a thesis or dissertation, in an online university repository. Though previous studies have shown that journal editors are willing to consider manuscripts derived from electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), faculty advisors and graduate students continue to raise concerns that online discoverability of ETDs negatively impact future opportunities to publish those findings. The current study investigated science journal policies on open access ETDs and found that more than half of the science journals contacted (51.4%) reported that manuscripts derived from openly accessible ETDs are welcome for submission and an additional 29.1% would accept revised ETDs under certain conditions.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

"Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities? Findings from a 2011 Survey of Academic Publishers"

Marisa L. Ramirez et al. have published "Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities? Findings from a 2011 Survey of Academic Publishers" in the latest issue of College & Research Libraries.

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 unfettered 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 that are revisions of openly accessible ETDs are always welcome for submission or considered on a case-by-case basis by 82.8 percent of journal editors and 53.7 percent of university press directors polled.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

"Jarrow, Electronic Thesis, and Dissertation Software"

James R.W. MacDonald and Daniel Yule have published "Jarrow, Electronic Thesis, and Dissertation Software" in the latest issue of the Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Collecting and disseminating theses and dissertations electronically is not a new concept. Tools and platforms have emerged to handle various components of the submission and distribution process. However, there is not a tool that handles the entirety of the process from the moment the student begins work on their thesis to the dissemination of the final thesis. The authors have created such a tool which they have called Jarrow. After reviewing available open-source software for theses submission and open-source institutional repository software this paper discusses why and how Jarrow was created and how it works. Jarrow can be downloaded and the project followed at http://code.library.unbc.ca.

| Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

"Linked Data Services for Theses and Dissertations"

Thomas Johnson and Michael Boock have self-archived "Linked Data Services for Theses and Dissertations" in ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper details work at Oregon State University to create a Linked Dataset covering the University's theses and dissertations. Using data from existing MARC and Qualified Dublin Core records, we have established a process and model for crosswalking data from existing records into a variety of Semantic Web vocabularies. Our approach is to create basic services on a dedicated thesis and dissertation interface, incrementally extending those available through our institutional repository. We describe services implemented, those in progress and plans for continued work. We also address the limitations of our existing metadata and resulting challenges in crosswalking and interoperability.

| Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

"Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities?"

College & Research Libraries has released an preprint of "Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities?"

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 |

"Trends from the Canadian IR/ETD Survey 2012"

Nancy Stuart and Katy Nelson have self-archived "Trends from the Canadian IR/ETD Survey 2012" in UVicSPACE.

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 |

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, Version 6

Digital Scholarship has released the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, Version 6. It includes selected English-language articles, books, conference papers, technical reports, unpublished e-prints and other scholarly textual sources that are useful in understanding electronic theses and dissertations. Most sources have been published from 2000 through 2011; however, a limited number of earlier key sources are also included. The bibliography includes links to freely available versions of included works. It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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

Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011

Digital Scholarship has released the Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011. This 96-page book presents over 600 English-language articles, books, technical reports, and other works that are useful in understanding institutional repositories and ETDs. It covers institutional repository (IR) country and regional surveys, multiple-institution repositories, specific IRs, IR digital preservation issues, IR library issues, IR metadata strategies, institutional open access mandates and policies, IR R&D projects, IR research studies, IR open source software, and electronic theses and dissertations. Most sources have been published from 2000 through June 30, 2011; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 2000 are also included. Many references have links to freely available copies of included works.

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."

Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 Cover cover

| Digital Scholarship |

Vision, Impact, Success: Mandating Electronic Theses

Josh Brown and Kathy Sadler have self-archived Vision, Impact, Success: Mandating Electronic Theses in UCL Eprints.

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 |

Presentations from the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries 2010

Presentations from the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries 2010 are now available.

Here's some representative presentations:

Electronic Theses and Dissertations: OpenETD Software Released

The Rutgers University Libraries have released OpenETD.

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.

Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations Now Has More Than 1 Million ETD Records

The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations now contains records for over one million electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs).

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.

"Five Dozen Doctoral Students Chose Bits and Bytes over Ink and Paper"

In "Five Dozen Doctoral Students Chose Bits and Bytes over Ink and Paper," Kathleen J. Sullivan discusses Stanford University's ETD program.

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.

Stanford University to Implement Electronic Dissertations

Stanford University will implement an electronic dissertation program this month.

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.

ETD Self-Archiving Tools: ICE-TheOREM Final Report

JISC has released the ICE-TheOREM Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

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.

Stevan Harnad on "Integrating Universities' Thesis and Research Deposit Mandates"

Stevan Harnad has self-archived the text of his "Integrating Universities' Thesis and Research Deposit Mandates" presentation in the ECS EPrints Repository.

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

Peter Sefton on ThesICE (ICE for Theses)

In "ICE for Theses (ThesICE), Where We Are We Up To?," Peter Sefton, Manage of Software Research and Development Laboratory at the Australian Digital Futures Institute, discusses ThesICE (ICE for Theses).

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.

Web Services and Repositories: Report from an EThOSnet Project Workshop

Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) has released Web Services and Repositories: Report from an EThOSnet project workshop, British Library, 2nd June 2009.

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.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, Version 4

The Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, Version 4 is now available from Digital Scholarship.

This bibliography presents selected English-language articles, conference papers, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories.