[okfn-discuss] Proposal for OpenThesis Project

Tue Jul 13 13:00:46 UTC 2010

Many thanks

On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 1:44 PM, Thomas Kluyver
<thomas.kluyver at cantab.net>wrote:

> On 12 July 2010 06:40, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> 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
>
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>

-- 
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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