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

www.bl.uk 4

EThOS content - records

www.bl.uk 5

Access to the full thesis wherever possible

www.bl.uk 6

EThOS content – full text theses

www.bl.uk 8

Monthly usage

www.bl.uk 9

Usage – annual trend

www.bl.uk 10

EThOS in numbers

2000+ new records a

month357,000 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

www.bl.uk 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.

www.bl.uk 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

www.bl.uk 13

Research Councils UK Training Grants

www.bl.uk 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.”

www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/Pages/grantstcs.aspx

www.bl.uk 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

www.bl.uk 16

www.bl.uk 17

Emerging role of EThOS

• Digitisation of the UK’s theses

• Metadata enhancement

• Novel use of the aggregated corpus

www.bl.uk 18

Digitisation on demand

www.bl.uk 19

Digitisation on demand

www.bl.uk 20

Digitisation options for institutions

www.bl.uk 21

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.

www.bl.uk 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?

www.bl.uk 24

Metadata 3 – Subject classification

– Dewey, LCSH, keywords, JACS …

– Catalogues v. repositories

– Discipline-specific indexes, e.g…

www.bl.uk 25

www.bl.uk 26

www.bl.uk 27

www.bl.uk 28

www.bl.uk 29

DART Europe

www.bl.uk 30

Emerging role of EThOS

• Digitisation of the UK’s theses

• Metadata enhancement

• Novel use of the aggregated corpus

www.bl.uk 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

www.bl.uk 32

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.

www.bl.uk 33

EThOS – next phase

www.bl.uk 35

Listservs

• JISC-Repositories@jiscmail.ac.uk

• E-Theses-uk@jiscmail.ac.uk

• ETD@ndltd.org

www.bl.uk 36

Thank you!

ethos.bl.uk

Sara.Gould@bl.uk