Temple University has decided to require OA to all its doctoral dissertations, starting with those completed August 2008. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) From the announcement (December 4, 2008):
The Temple University Libraries, in partnership with the Temple University Graduate School, is pleased to announce that all doctoral dissertations completed at Temple University will be freely available online through the University Libraries newly launched Digital Collections website. All dissertations completed at Temple, beginning August 2008, are added to this digital repository....
As part of this shift to all-digital dissertations the Libraries will no longer add paper copies of Temple dissertations to the Library stacks nor will it collect dissertations on microfilm....
All Temple Dissertations will continue to be indexed by the authoritative international database Digital Dissertations (formerly known as Dissertation Abstracts) to which Temple and many other universities subscribe, but now they will also be directly accessible to any Web user free of charge. Many other leading research universities have created similar “open-access” electronic dissertation repositories and have found that cutting-edge doctoral research is more frequently read and cited as a result of making dissertations globally available in an open-access repository. For example, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln recently reported their open-access dissertations are downloaded sixty times more frequently than are restricted versions offered through the institutional subscription to Digital Dissertations....
Comment. Kudos to Temple. I hope that all universities will consider an OA mandate for ETDs and that Temple will now consider an OA mandate for peer-reviewed journal articles by faculty, for example, like the Harvard policy.
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.
