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Opening access to UK doctoral theses: the EThOS E-Theses Service 13 August 2014 Sara Gould
www.bl.uk 2
www.bl.uk 3
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 record of all UK theses
• Free access to the full text of as many as possible
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EThOS content - records
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Access to the full thesis wherever possible
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EThOS content – full text theses
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Monthly usage
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Usage – annual trend
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EThOS in numbers
2000+ 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
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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.
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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
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Research Councils UK Training Grants
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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
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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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Emerging role of EThOS
• Digitisation of the UK’s theses
• Metadata enhancement
• Novel use of the aggregated corpus
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Digitisation on demand
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Digitisation on demand
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Digitisation options for institutions
18%
21%
46%
15% HEI pays (deposit a/c)HEI pays (invoiced)User paysDigitisation not supported
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Emerging role of EThOS
• Digitisation of the UK’s theses
• Metadata enhancement
• Novel use of the aggregated corpus
www.bl.uk 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.
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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?
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Metadata 3 – Subject classification
– Dewey, LCSH, keywords, JACS … – Catalogues v. repositories
– Discipline-specific indexes, e.g…
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DART Europe
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Emerging role of EThOS
• Digitisation of the UK’s theses
• Metadata enhancement
• Novel use of the aggregated corpus
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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
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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.
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EThOS – next phase
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