[okfn-discuss] Proposal for OpenThesis Project

[O.Stephens]

> 
> 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

Might be worth having a look at this recent post from the Names project about their Institutional URIs and recommendations from the NISO working group on Institutional Identifiers? http://namesproject.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/identifying-institutions/

> * 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.
> 

The UKETD DC Application Profile uses the dc.rights to store rights metadata - but I guess we may need something more structured for machine parsability? What might be useful from the UKETD DC AP is the relatively well structured 'embargo' metadata. See http://ethostoolkit.cranfield.ac.uk/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=47 for more detail.

Clearly this is UK based, and it isn't clear how many repositories have implemented this fully, but it is what EThOS recommends is used, and I think (from memory) the Embargo fields werer intended to be functional for EThOS.

Owen

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