[okfn-discuss] Proposal for OpenThesis Project

Thu Jul 15 12:27:41 UTC 2010

Owen,
This is brilliant! And it will help to clarify and focus our communal ideas

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 11:16 AM, O.Stephens <o.stephens at open.ac.uk> wrote:

>  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?)
>

It was the EThOS project I met a few days ago - chaired by Lorraine Estelle.
We met 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
>

Excellent. We know Paul well - he was on some of our advisory committees for
SPECTRa.

>
> 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 .
>

Yes - I have skimmed this. At present I don't think the OKF should be
involved in making individual theses Open, but it would be very useful to
have formal statements of the types of Openness that are in use.

One things that we really need for all this scholarly Openness is an index
of institutions , with uniquids. My simplistic view at present is that for
each institution we have:
* uniquid
* URL/URI of its repository
* table of contents of theses (this does not exist in many repositories). It
might be machine extracted if we can get the whole repopsitory TOC
* annotation of each entry's bibliographic metatdata to include Openness of
each thesis.

Obviously the more we can work with existing projects the better. They may
well have information that simply needs transforming

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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