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Opening access to UK doctoral theses: the EThOS E-Theses Service 13 August 2014 Sara Gould. EThOS: http://ethos.bl.uk. Increase visibility of top research by UK’s universities Make doctoral theses more accessible for researchers Support authors and funders of PhDs
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Opening access to UK doctoral theses:the EThOS E-Theses Service13 August 2014 Sara Gould
EThOS: http://ethos.bl.uk • Increase visibility of top research by UK’s universities • Make doctoral theses more accessible for researchers • Support authors and funders of PhDs • A recordof all UK theses • Free access to the full text of as many as possible
EThOS in numbers 130,000 full text theses 357,000 records 2000+ new records a month Users in every country 127 UK universities 40 million pages of top research! 30 a day scanned from paper 1200 theses viewed every day
Getting content into EThOS • Legacy records from British Library catalogue • New EThOS records created from title pages • Metadata harvested from repositories • Catalogue records converted and added • Full texts ingested – with permission • Gaps filled by ‘speculative’ requests.
Opening up access to research • HEFCE Research Excellence Framework (REF) • Mechanism for funding UK HE • Next REF will require all submissions to be OA • Target of 96% of all submissions • Extra credits for going beyond the minimum – e.g. text mining • Research Councils • Public funding for research • RCUK Open access policy
Research Councils UK Training Grants TGC 12 Publication and Acknowledgement of Support “ … In the case of Ph.D. theses funded by Research Councils, metadata describing the thesis should be lodged in the institution's repository as soon as possible after award and a full text version should be available within a maximum of 12 months following award. It is expected that metadata in institutional repositories will be compatible with the metadata core set recommended by the ETHOS e-thesis online service.” www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/Pages/grantstcs.aspx
Open access PhDs? • Funder OA policies do not apply to theses • No UK national mandate for deposit, reporting, open access or archiving • Each institution develops their own policy • OA theses embraced by most institutions
Emerging role of EThOS • Digitisation of the UK’s theses • Metadata enhancement • Novel use of the aggregated corpus
Emerging role of EThOS • Digitisation of the UK’s theses • Metadata enhancement • Novel use of the aggregated corpus
Metadata 1 – Author identifiers • ISNI • Assigned to ‘authors’ • 75,000 EThOS authors have an ISNI • 50,000 potential matches • Orcid • Claimed by ‘researchers’ • PhD often their first research output • Import your EThOS thesis to your Orcid profile • EThOS development is now needed to accommodate the data.
Metadata 2 – Thesis identifiers • Provide a match key and reduce duplication • Easier citation • Easier linking, e.g. to underlying datasets held elsewhere • Reduce link rot DOIs for theses?
Metadata 3 – Subject classification • Dewey, LCSH, keywords, JACS … • Catalogues v. repositories • Discipline-specific indexes, e.g…
Emerging role of EThOS • Digitisation of the UK’s theses • Metadata enhancement • Novel use of the aggregated corpus
Novel research uses of the thesis corpus “Dramatically under-used” “Sheer potential for research” • Metadata • Royal Society of Chemistry – analysis of research trends. • Full texts • Using machines to assign LC subject headings to theses • “Academic English for Law” – training materials for language learning
RSC National Compound Collection • Royal Society of Chemistry text mining project • Presentation at http://www.slideshare.net/RSC-Chemistry/realizing-a-uk-national-compound-collection • Example of extracted compound at http://www.chemspider.com/Thesis.aspx?thesis_id=45 • BL/EThOS project to understand opportunities, issues, challenges • BL facilitating use of UK theses with permission.
Listservs • JISC-Repositories@jiscmail.ac.uk • E-Theses-uk@jiscmail.ac.uk • ETD@ndltd.org