Projects/Open Theses

Purpose
Many thousands of theses are produced per year but few have explicit rights and fewer still are OKD-compliant. Many theses are partially Open - they have sections which have "copyright transferred" to publishers but others Open. Despite the increasing number of theses in Institutional repositories there is no global bibliography or index of theses enabling location and re-use of content. A bibliography of Open theses could be compiled repository-by-repository using crowdsourcing, and this could help create University representatives of the OKF throughout the world.

Project members

 * co-ordinator: Peter Murray-Rust

Conformance to OKF guidelines

 * Open Data and Content: data and content, or any other kind of resources, produced by the project will be openly licensed in a way that is compatible with the Open Definition: http://opendefinition.org/
 * Free/Open Source Software: software created by the project will be openly licensed (i.e. in conformance with the OSI Open Source Definition)
 * Public process and politness: the project will be run in a public way and encourage participation from outsiders. Interaction both within the project and the wider community will be governed by basic principles of tolerance, respect and politeness.

Support needs

 * The initial project would be to seek volunteers and publicity under the #jiscopenbib project.
 * The computing resources would be relatively modest - perhaps 100,000 entries (in the first instance) at a few kbytes.
 * PMR has spoken with the JISC EthoS project and they are aware of the value of Openness. This project could have synergy with funders such as JISC and Wellcome, and might also get traction from University repository owners.
 * A successful start would hopefully lead to a convincing funding proposal, to cover further resource costs.

Participate
This project is currently incubating, awaiting acceptance as an OKF project. Further discussion can be done on the OKF coord group mailing list;