I was project director for the EThOSNet project which setup the EThOS service, and although I'm no longer involved it is still an area of great interest for me. In terms of contacts, as well as keeping the EThOS team in the UK in the loop (do you mean the team at the BL?), the people at DART may also be valuable contacts? Paul Ayris at UCL or Chris Pressler at Nottingham are co-directors of DART http://www.dart-europe.eu/About/contacts/board.php
The EThOS Toolkit may be helpful when it comes to recommendations to institutions - there is already quite a lot of stuff there that suggests how institutions and individuals deal with IP/permissions - the 'legal' section has model letters/agreements etc which could be a useful starting point http://ethostoolkit.cranfield.ac.uk/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=21 . Owen Owen Stephens TELSTAR Project Manager Library and Learning Resources Centre The Open University Walton Hall Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA T: +44 (0) 1908 858701 F: +44 (0) 1908 653571 E: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> ________________________________ From: Peter Murray-Rust [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 13 July 2010 14:01 To: Open Knowledge Foundation discussion list Subject: Re: [okfn-discuss] Proposal for OpenThesis Project Many thanks On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 1:44 PM, Thomas Kluyver <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 12 July 2010 06:40, Peter Murray-Rust <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: So I currently suggest OKFTheses or OKTheses to avoid the name clash, but that's just a start. Longer term, I think the name should be something that universities would want to boast about working with, so I'd avoid acronyms that people won't recognise. What about something along the lines of 'Shared Theses Project' or 'Free Theses Project'. A good point The Open/Free libre/gratis is a problem in English - I don't have easy answers In terms of priorities, from my own experience, getting a set of 'principles' across to universities is important part, rather than the technical matter of indexing metadata. I agree. My current fuzzy strategy is to build something that is useful and at the same time lobby university repositories. The problem is that there are probably 5000 - 10000 HE institutions globally (anyone have a better figure?) and we can only do this by crowdsourcing. (Have we ever had the idea of an OKF contact/group per institution? This could be a very powerful way of engaging?) This is the rather confused boilerplate text that my university currently uses (apologies to open-science listmembers who've already seen it): This electronic thesis is protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No reproduction is permitted without consent of the author. It is also protected by the Creative Commons Licence allowing Attributions-Non-commercial-No derivatives. This is really valuable evidence. It is, presumably, self-contradictory. This (with many variations) is common - some are NC-SA, most are covered by a blanket statement on the repository: "the items in this repo are protected by copyright. Unless you get explicit written permission from the author(s) you can't do anything" You are absolutely right we have to change this. But I think it should be done on two fronts. If we cannot even find the theses then we can't even try to do anything. Thomas _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 -- The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).
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