The organisations JISC (UK), the National Library of Sweden and the Dutch SURFfoundation have tested the interoperability of repositories for e-theses. The result is a freely accessible European e-Theses portal providing access to over 10,000 doctoral theses.
For the first time ever, various local repositories containing doctoral e-theses have been harvested on an international scale. Five countries were involved in the project: Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
Doctoral theses contain some of the most current and valuable research produced within universities. Still, they are underused as research resources. Nowadays, theses and dissertations no longer have to gather dust in attics or on the shelves of university libraries. By making them available on the Internet, both the author and the university can showcase their research, benefiting not only fellow scientists, but a broad public as well. And when they are publicly available, they are used many times more often than printed theses available only at libraries or by inter-library loan.
The report may be useful for institutions that wish to show the world the results of their research. By making their material accessible in a standardised manner and using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), they can reach beyond any boundary….
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/01/2007 04:39:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
