Reposited dissertation with the repository also archiving and presenting web resources cited in text.

Last year a number of early career academics discovered that their PhD theses, which had been deposited in institutional open access repositories, were being sold for profit via Amazon Seller pages…

Thousands of works produced at British university were available on Kindle services following mass scraping of online repository.

The following case study describes an academic library’s recent experience implementing the harvesting method to submit electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) into the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global database (PQDT). In this lesser-known approach, ETDs are deposited first in the institutional repository (IR), where they get processed, to be later harvested for free by ProQuest through the IR’s Open Archives Initiative (OAI) feed. The method provides a series of advantages over some of the alternative methods, including students’ choice to opt-in or out from ProQuest, better control over the embargo restrictions, and more customization power without having to rely on overly complicated workflows. Institutions interested in adopting a simple, automated, post-IR method to submit ETDs into ProQuest, while keeping the local workflow, should benefit from this method. 

On Thursday, May 23, a Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations was held at Purdue University. Ashlee Messersmith, manager, thesis/dissertation, The Graduate School at Purdue University, and Michael Witt, associate professor, Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies, organized the

Objectives: The objective of this study is to evaluate the quality and usability of supplementary data files deposited, between 1971 and 2015, to our university institutional repository. Understanding the extent to which content historically deposited in digital repositories is usable by today’s researchers can help inform digital preservation and documentation practices for researchers today. Methods: I identified all graduate level theses and dissertations (GTDs) in the institutional repository with multiple files as a first pass at identifying documents that included supplementary data files. These GTDs were then individually examined, removing supplementary files that were artifacts of either the upload or digitization process. The remaining “true” supplementary files were then individually opened and evaluated following elements of the DATA rubric of Van Tuyl and Whitmire (2016). Results: Supplementary files were discovered in the repository dating back to 1971 in 116 GTD submissions totalling more than 25,000 files. Most GTD submissions included fewer than 30 files, though some submissions included thousands of individual data files. The most common file types submitted include imagery, tabular data, and databases, with a very large number of unknown file types. Overall, levels of documentation were poor while actionability of datasets was generally middling. Conclusions: The results presented in this study suggest that legacy data submitted to our institutional repository with GTDs is generally in poor shape with respect to Transparency and somewhat less so for Actionability. It is clear from this study and others that researchers have a long road ahead when it comes to sharing data in a way that makes it potentially useable by other researchers.

Accepted Manuscript

Many Chinese doctorate students can’t graduate until they publish articles in academic journals — a demand that pushes many into corruption.

When I first began working with electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), the conversation in libraries appeared to revolve around open access and publication embargoes. It seemed to me that the primary task for scholarly communication librarians in this area was to broaden access to graduate research while protecting future publication opportunities for individual authors. As graduate students begin to publish earlier in their careers, the relationship between the doctoral dissertation and scholarly publishing is evolving. Many students now include their own previously published work in a dissertation, requiring instruction in publication contracts and copyright transfer agreements at the point of submission to the graduate school.

This study examines ETDs deposited during the period 2011-2015 in an institutional repository, to determine the degree to which the documents suffer from reference rot, that is, linkrot plus content drift. The authors converted and examined 664 doctoral dissertations in total, extracting 11,437 links, finding overall that 77% of links were active, and 23% exhibited linkrot.  A stratified random sample of 49 ETDs was performed which produced 990 active links, which were then checked for content drift based on mementos found in the Wayback Machine.  Mementos were found for 77% of links, and approximately half of these, 492 of 990, exhibited content drift. The results serve to emphasize not only the necessity of broader awareness of this problem, but also to stimulate action on the preservation front.