digitizationblog

[Note: Edited June 9 to clean up some pretty egregious and numerous typos.]

I'm lucky enough to be at ETD 2006 in Quebec City, and want to share some of my notes. At the end of the first day I can say that this is an excellent conference for anyone involved with electronic theses and dissertations, and since this is an international conference, the variety of approaches to supporting the creation of and access to this extremely important body of knowledge is wide and at the same time remarkably cohesive.

Ed Fox, Director of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), opened the sessions with welcoming remarks and an overview of the NDLTD. This acronym is so difficult to write, pronounce, and remember that I’ll use the N from here on. Fox stressed that the N is all about “student empowerment” and adding value to graduate students’ work. The N coordinates a number of services that fulfill that goal, including a repository where students whose institutions don’t have an IR can deposit their work, and a union catalogue (in conjunction with OCLC) describing roughly 250,000 electronic theses. The N also coordinates technologies that support access to electronic theses – OAI-PMH, LOCKSS, and the ETD-ms, a descriptive metadata specification that is widely deployed in thesis collections. Activities on the horizon for the N include developing specifications for collections and subcollections of ETDs based on OAI sets, and partnering with Google Scholar to increase access to ETDs through that service. Takeaway phrase: “The spirit of the [N] is to make things easy and simple.”

The Plenary Session was by Open Access guru Peter Suber (“guru” is used here in the most complimentary way – Peter is truly a leading voice in OA advocacy). Peter began by comparing theses and journal literature: theses are not peer reviewed in the same way as journal artricle are but they are in fact "scrutinized more thoroughly than" journal articles. For example, many journal reiviews takes splace in "one afternoon" while the review process on a thesis is done over months, and faculty review is quite "rigorous" in the sense that they are more accountable for their reviews than anonymous reviewers are. As someone who has lived through writing a master’s thesis, and who has been a reviewer for journals, I immediately recognized Peter’s distinction.

Peter also asserted that while theses suffer from obscurity (they are typically physically located and described in one place – the awarding institution) and enjoy much less indexing and abstracting than articles in even the most obscure journals, the are usually of extremely high quality in terms of their currency and comprehensiveness, not to mention their intellectual rigour.

Peter then outlined his definition of Open Access: work that is in digital format, is online, is free of charge and free of most copyright restrictions. However, the same works may be available in for-pay versions, and OA still respects the creator’s copyright – it is just that the creator has chosen to make the work available to promote its use, instead of opting for direct, simplistic profit models. The license attached to OA works should allow a "flexibility about which barriers to use to remove" such as allowing derivative works, liberal noncommercial use, and so on. Above all, Peter stressed that Open Access must keep copyright in the hands of the creator and out of the hands of those who would place profit over use.

My notes from Peter’s hour-long talk fill four single-spaced pages. I’ll finish by outlining Peter’s views on how universities can push the Open Access agenda.

First, providing both scholarly journal articles and ETDs under OA policies is low hanging fruit: in both cases the authors do not expect or and rarely get royalties for their work, unlike novels, textbooks, music, or film.

According to Peter, OA policies for theses is not the major obstacle, getting students to submit their theses in electronic form (i.e., as ETDs) is the major obstacle. ETD policies are a prerequisite for and at the same time foster OA policies, and in fact many universities persuade graduate students to submit their theses in digital format by promising increased use.

Some universities mandate OA ETDs. The conditions for this mandate are right: theses are born digital, they do not directly generate royalties, and as theses no publishers exist “to get in the way, to resist, to create fear, to muddy the waters.”

Ultimately, “exhortations to Open Access don’t work, mandates work.” This claim may appear solipsistic, but there are documented examples: the National Institutes of Health in the US does not mandate OA and realizes an OA access rate of less than 4% of eligible articles; the Wellcome Trust in the UK mandates OA and realizes virtual complete OA to eligible articles. Universities in Australia who mandate OA to theses realize their goal while ones that make OA optional only achieve 25% OA submissions at best. Therefore, if universities want OA on theses and dissertations, they have to mandate it.

Most important to advocating OA is making faculty and grad students realize that "OA is not a charitable donation – they are not just helping readers, they are helping themselves and their institutions." Researchers who make their work available under OA terms achieve higher citation impact; they also raise the profile of their institutions by doing so. In fact, Peter says that universities should adopt OA policies (for theses and faculty research) because doing so says to the world that that they respect research for its own sake and do not consider it a commodity to be traded. Encouraging open access to ETDs now will pay off in corresponding attitudes toward journal and book publishing in the near future.

This all said, Peter only supports OA mandates based on conditions of voluntary contracts, and that have reasonable conditions. For example, if students know of the OA requirement before entering the grad program, mandating that their thesis is made available under OA is acceptable; if the requirement is not made clear before the students enters the graduate program, the requirement is not fair since the students' freedom to choose to publish OA is removed. Also, Peter does not support OA policies that force authors to disclose their work before they are ready to disclose it, as in the case of theses that contain descriptions of patentable technologies before the patent has been awarded.

I’ve run out of steam, but only because the ETD Conference is so stimulating. The next speaker was my friend Art Rhyno, and I'll describe his excellent presentation later today. Tomorrow I present on the Canadian Association of Research Libraries Metadata Harvester, and hope to report on some the sessions in the afternoon.