Opening access to UK doctoral theses: the EThOS E-Theses Service 13 August 2014 Sara Gould

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3 EThOS: Increase visibility of top research by UK’s universities Make doctoral theses more accessible for researchers Support authors and funders of PhDs A record of all UK theses Free access to the full text of as many as possible

4 EThOS content - records

5 Access to the full thesis wherever possible

6 EThOS content – full text theses

7 Country of users

8 Monthly usage

9 Usage – annual trend

10 EThOS in numbers new records a month 357,000 records 127 UK universities 30 a day scanned from paper 130,000 full text theses Users in every country 40 million pages of top research! 1200 theses viewed every day

11 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.

12 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

13 Research Councils UK Training Grants

14 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.”

15 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

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17 Emerging role of EThOS Digitisation of the UK’s theses Metadata enhancement Novel use of the aggregated corpus

18 Digitisation on demand

19 Digitisation on demand

20 Digitisation options for institutions

21 Emerging role of EThOS Digitisation of the UK’s theses Metadata enhancement Novel use of the aggregated corpus

22 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.

23 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?

24 Metadata 3 – Subject classification –Dewey, LCSH, keywords, JACS … –Catalogues v. repositories –Discipline-specific indexes, e.g…

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29 DART Europe

30 Emerging role of EThOS Digitisation of the UK’s theses Metadata enhancement Novel use of the aggregated corpus

31 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

32 RSC National Compound Collection Royal Society of Chemistry text mining project Presentation at Chemistry/realizing-a-uk-national-compound-collectionhttp:// Chemistry/realizing-a-uk-national-compound-collection Example of extracted compound at BL/EThOS project to understand opportunities, issues, challenges BL facilitating use of UK theses with permission.

33 EThOS – next phase

34 EThOS business model(s) 1.EThOS development integral to – and dependent on - digitisation funds from institutions Free to users  Too good to be true 2.Membership – institutions paid annual subscriptions Enabled development Focused the mind  Two-tier service; uncertain income 3.British Library core service Free to HE All institutions are equal Sustainable – costs and requirements are known.

35 Listservs

36 Thank you! ethos.bl.uk