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