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Monday, December 19, 2005

Mandating OA to ETDs

Arthur Sale, The impact of mandatory policies on ETD acquisition, a preprint, self-archived November 16, 2005. (Thanks to Charles Bailey's Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog.)
Abstract: This paper analyzes the data now available in Australia's coordinated Electronic Theses and Dissertations gateway to show the impact of high-level institutional policy decisions on population of the individual repositories. The paper shows that just like research article repositories, voluntary ETD deposition results in repositories collecting only about 15% of the available theses, whereas mandatory policies are well accepted and cause deposit rates to rise towards 100%. Modeling of the PhD and Master process in Australia is also carried out to indicate the delays and liabilities to be expected if mandatory policies are applied only to newly enrolled candidates.