Projects/OpenETD

= Project Name = Open access to electronic theses and dissertations

Purpose
Provide a framework for making electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) freely available, easily discoverable, and maximally reusable.

Changelog

 * http://knowledgeforge.net/microfacts/trac/timeline/

Roadmap

 * http://knowledgeforge.net/microfacts/trac/roadmap?show=all

(a) set up an open-Thesis mailing list and project/pirate page This page or http://open-thesis.okfnpad.org/initial-thoughts ? (b) evolve a similar  approach to the Panton Principles which applied to theses. It would be something like: 1 author: make a clear statement of your wishes (do NOT rely on formal licences to convey this) 2 author: identify which parts of your work do not involve third party rights (e.g. graphic images or transcluded  text). Label these clearly and in machine-readable form; institution: support the author in this process 3 author (with institutional help): select an appropriate licence or set of licences. (theses may contain text, source code, data and these all require different licences. 4 institution: display the thesis  and metadata and licences in machine  readable-form. Make it trivial for machines to ascertain that (a) this  is a thesis (b) what rights the machine-reader  has to re-use the material. Promote discovery of theses (e.g. through  tables of contents). 5 institution: label theses as Open (e.g. with  an OKF OpenThesis button)

(c) create exemplars for demonstration and advocacy We could use http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2009/2416/, still have the TeX source.

(d) engage with early-adopter repositories

(e) engage with regulators/funderadvocacy SPARC, JISC,  Wellcome, SURF, NSDL, OR, ETD, etc.

(f) design and populate an OpenThesis Bibliography (Table Of Contents) by a mixture of crawling  repositories and crowdsourcing. I would not expect this to violate any rights

Participate

 * Via email: join the okfn-discuss list, initially via this thread.

More Details
Detailed overview by Peter Suber (2006): http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-06.htm#etds
 * Nine reasons to mandate OA for ETDs

(1) Nowadays most theses and dissertations are born digital. They're already ETDs even if the university only wants to deal with printouts.

(2) ETDs are Phase One, royalty-free works of research literature. Their authors lose no revenue by consenting to OA.

(3) ETDs are not formally published. Hence there are no publishers in the picture to resist or oppose OA. There are no publisher fears of lost revenue to answer. There are no publisher permissions to seek. There are no publisher negotiations to delay or deter OA archiving.

(4) Mandates work and exhortations don't. This is the universal lesson from OA mandates to date, whether at funding agencies or universities.

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has encouraged but not required OA to NIH-funded research since May 2005. It hoped that the increased flexibility would increase participation, but it had the opposite effect. In February 2006, the NIH reported to Congress that the compliance rate by its grantees was only 3.8%. The low rate led the agency's own Public Access Working Group to recommend a mandate (November 2005). The Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine reaffirmed the call for a mandate in February 2006. And last month, the House Appropriations Committee instructed the NIH to adopt a mandate. (See my story on this above.)

By contrast, the Wellcome Trust has mandated OA to Wellcome-funded research since October 2005 and has enjoyed a nearly 100% compliance rate.

Australia registers all accepted dissertations, giving it a good sense of the denominator, or the number of dissertations eligible for OA. The OA repositories themselves give a good sense of the numerator, or the number that are actually OA at a given time. In April 2006, Arthur Sale summarized the results of different university policies on OA for ETDs: "[V]oluntary ETD deposition results in repositories collecting less than 12% of the available theses, whereas mandatory policies are well accepted and cause deposit rates to rise towards 100%."

(5) OA solves the invisibility problem for ETDs. Without OA, there is almost no access, visibility, or indexing for dissertations. They are hard to retrieve even if discovered, and they are hard to discover. When they are OA, ETDs are not only searchable by cross-archive search tools that index the ETD repositories, they are also indexed (in growing numbers but jerky stages) by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Scirus already indexes the ETDs held by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD).

By making ETDs visible, OA helps the readers who wouldn't otherwise have ready access. But it also helps the ETD authors, boosting their visibility and impact just as it does for the authors of journal articles. I don't believe that anyone has studied the OA citation advantage for ETDs, but for journal articles it ranges from 50% to 250% and it's likely to be comparable (not necessarily identical) for ETDs.

(6) Universities are in a good position to mandate OA. They can make it a simple condition of submission and acceptance.

In fact, if universities mandate OA for ETDs, their compliance rates should be higher, and grumbling lower, than mandating OA for faculty research articles. Graduate students are not as anarchical as faculty, or at least not tenured; graduate students won't be subject to countervailing pressures from publishers, at least not as often; and graduate students more likely to see the benefits of OA and the obviousness of taking advantage of the internet to disseminate research.

Universities that don't have institutional repositories can still mandate OA. The best way is to launch their own IR. But they could use a consortial or regional ETD repository, or they could have their students submit ETDs directly to NDLTD, which functions as a universal or fall-back OA repository for universities without their own. They could use the universal repository I'm setting up with the Internet Archive (delayed but still coming). Or they could use ProQuest's UMI, which will offer OA to ETDs when the authors or institutions request OA.

(7) Mandating OA for ETDs will educate the next generation of scholars about OA, when they don't already know about it. Young scholars are already more familiar with OA than older ones, at least in the sciences. But even knowledgeable young scholars may not have much experience providing OA to their own work, let alone support and reinforcement from an important research institution. An OA mandate will teach new scholars how easy it is, how beneficial it is, and how routine and expected it ought to be. It will teach them that OA is not incendiary and countercultural, but mainstream and simply useful. It will help create lifelong habits of self-archiving.

The greatest obstacle to routine self-archiving is unfamiliarity with the process, including groundless fears of the time it takes. Familiarity removes this obstacle.

(8) An OA mandate will elicit better work.

All teachers know that students work harder and do better work when they know they are writing for a real audience --large or small-- beyond the teacher. The effect is amplified if they are writing for the public. Some teachers try to harness this power by telling students to write as if their work were to appear on the front page of the New York Times. Some arrange to give students a real audience beyond the teacher. In a law course in which I conducted moot court, the quality of student preparation and argument improved dramatically after I started videotaping them. I didn't even have to put the videos online; I just put them on reserve in the library for the rest of the semester.

OA gives authors a real audience beyond the dissertation committee and real incentives to do original, impressive work.

I wrote my dissertation on Kierkegaard's dissertation. The members of my committee were strong on Kierkegaard in general, but comparatively weak on his dissertation. There were many spots in my dissertation where I could have bluffed if wanted to. But even when grad students think it's safe and easy to fool their committee, it's risky and difficult to fool the world.

(9) Finally, an OA mandate shows that the university takes the dissertation seriously.

The university asks for a new and significant work of scholarship and most students deliver one. But because the university doesn't disseminate the dissertation publicly, it sends a subtle signal that it doesn't take it seriously as a work of scholarship. Of course the dissertation committee takes it very seriously as a work of scholarship, but the university itself doesn't do what it normally does when its scholars produce new and important work: it doesn't apply its publish-or-perish policy. This policy not only proclaims that research good enough for internal recognition is good enough for external distribution. It also proclaims the stronger converse that only research good enough for external distribution is good enough for internal recognition.

Universities have the same interests in promulgating excellent research by grad students as they have in promulgating excellent research by faculty, the same reasons for taking pride in it, and the same reasons for applying a publish-or-perish policy or public dissemination mandate. It wants the world to know about the quality of the work done there and it wants other researchers to benefit from it. By adopting a serious public dissemination mandate for faculty and not for doctoral students, universities invite students to draw the cynical inference that the dissertation is not so much real scholarship as a hoop to jump through, a final piece of disposable "student work", an admission ticket to the profession, or a rite of passage.

Of course the dissertation is *also* an admission ticket and a rite of passage. Writing a dissertation is a lot like entering the wilderness alone, fasting to delirium, killing a wild animal, and then returning to civilization where one is welcomed as an adult. But universities should do more to send the signal that it's an admission ticket and rite of passage *because* it's a significant work of scholarship, not the other way around.

Students may regard the dissertation as fodder for some truly significant, adult scholarship they might publish in the future. But if so, the incentive to make it significant, adult, and public comes from a future employer, not from the institution that assigned, supervised, and approved the research.

Without an OA mandate, the university is saying that it doesn't care whether the dissertation is publicly disseminated. But if the dissertation is really a new and significant work of scholarship, then the university should care.

The message should be: If we approve a dissertation, then we think it's good. If we think it's good, then we want others to be able to find it, use it, and build on it.

Note that this message is about the purpose of universities and the value of scholarship, not about coercion. The school doesn't have to say "we're requiring OA for your sake" or even "we're requiring OA for our sake". It's saying, "We'll do all we can to help you do good work, and then we'll do all we can to make your good work available to others." It's about the mission of a research university.