Greetings all, I believe there is a real need for a communal effort in making academic theses more Open and would like the OKF to set up a project along these lines. I believe that the OKF is the most appropriate organization to address this issue (and perhaps the only one capable of doing it!). I am posting this to okfn-discuss (after recent meta-discussions) but am also happy for it to be re-copied and reformulated on [email protected] (and indeed this could act as the first trial of that). As the process is new I'm writing this slightly more discursively and occasionally in the first person, but obviously if this goes anywhere it would be communally owned.
Motivation ======== My motivation is that over several years (e.g. attending meetings of ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations ) and OR(OpenRepositories) and more recently an ETHOS meeting (JISC) that the university and HE sector does not fully address the issue of making theses Open. I should make it clear that they have all done a huge amount of good things - such as promoting born-digital theses and promoting repositories, and the OpenThesis project is intended to be entirely complementary. The problem arises from the fact that theses are by their nature protected by copyright. (There is an important additional point that much of a modern thesis may be more suitably regarded as "data" or "code" or "metadata" but I believe that OpenThesis will subsume these concerns by addressing the larger problem of copyright). Theses are often handled by University Libraries (who also often manage the repositories) and they naturally and responsibly address the problem of copyright. Too frequently, however, the actual rights are poorly represented, especially at the machine-understandbility level. There is often a single copyright notice on a repository which takes a (perhaps forgivable) approach that everything is forbidden unless permitted explicitly. Licences are often unnecessarily restrictive (e.g. ND-NC). There are excellent cases where libraries and authors are pro-active in encouraging licences to be embedded in theses but the normal case is that there are no explicit machine-readable rights on a per-work basis. Theses also have a commercial value and there are organizations which provide cataloguing and dissemination of theses or extract and republish of material. These derivative works are usually protected and there is a tendency for their rights to be applied to the orginal work by implication. I am one of many who would like machine-discoverable and machine-readable (i.e. semantic) theses. The original theses are often born in semantic form (HTML, DOCX/OOXML or TeX) but then flattened into PDF. Many theses are only available on a per-thesis basis, controlled by a portal/gatekeeper, which destroys any possibility of Linked open data. I am sure that most of the current lack of Linked Open Theses (LOT) is due to ignorance of the value of Openness. I think that if we can explain carefully and compellingly the value of LOT then many authors and many instituitions will welcome it. This is a global challenge. Institutions are regulated by local degree regulations (and these must be of course be honoured). Countries can only act for themselves (e.g. JISC, SURF(NL) and similar bodies elsewhere). The OKF can do something that they cannot easily do: * show the global vision * create exemplars * find and extol early adopters (and they already exist) * support and coordinate the actual authors (many of whom want their theses to be open). * provide accurate and compelling information Proposal ======= (a) set up an open-Thesis mailing list and project/pirate page (b) evolve a similar approach to the Panton Principles which applied to theses. It would be something like: 1 author: make a clear statement of your wishes (do NOT rely on formal licences to convey this) 2 author: identify which parts of your work do not involve third party rights (e.g. graphic images or transcluded text). Label these clearly and in machine-readable form; institution: support the author in this process 3 author (with institutional help): select an appropriate licence or set of licences. (theses may contain text, source code, data and these all require different licences. 4 institution: display the thesis and metadata and licences in machine readable-form. Make it trivial for machines to ascertain that (a) this is a thesis (b) what rights the machine-reader has to re-use the material. Promote discovery of theses (e.g. through tables of contents). 5 institution: label theses as Open (e.g. with an OKF OpenThesis button) (c) create exemplars for demonstration and advocacy (d) engage with early-adopter repositories (e) engage with regulators/funderadvocacy SPARC, JISC, Wellcome, SURF, NSDL, OR, ETD, etc. (f) design and populate an OpenThesis Bibliography (Table Of Contents) by a mixture of crawling repositories and crowdsourcing. I would not expect this to violate any rights Support and funding ================ The OKF is now a fundable body so I would expect that engagement with generic funders (JISC, SURF, ARDS, NSDL, etc.) would be appropriate. I would also hope that research funders (e.g. Wellcome, RCUK) would be sympathetic. Technical Requirements =================== (a) mailing list (b) project pages (c) probably some exemplars in CKAN or a special resource I would see the technology being developed on openbiblio-dev and #jiscopenbib as almost excelty what we need. It will create an Open ThesisTOC and will also allow us to annotate individual theses for Openness. I'd suggest this was organised by Country => Institution (=>Department). An attraction of this is we get a formal list of institutions as a result. Risks ==== I think the IP risks are small but should be considered. With goodwill from the community they are negligible. It's ambitious but it can easily be scaled per country or even per institution. This would distribute most of the human involvement. Many OKF people are probably actively involved in theses (doing research, writing up, just submitted, etc.) so there is a large pool of talent! P. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069
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