[okfn-discuss] Proposal for OpenThesis Project

Thu Jul 15 10:16:23 UTC 2010

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: o.stephens at open.ac.uk<mailto:o.stephens at open.ac.uk>

________________________________
From: Peter Murray-Rust [mailto:pm286 at cam.ac.uk]
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 <thomas.kluyver at cantab.net<mailto:thomas.kluyver at cantab.net>> wrote:
On 12 July 2010 06:40, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk<mailto: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

_______________________________________________
okfn-discuss mailing list
okfn-discuss at lists.okfn.org<mailto:okfn-discuss at lists.okfn.org>
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).
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/attachments/20100715/86831664/attachment-0001.html>