march08b.indd scholarly communication Richard Fyffe and William C. Welburn ETDs, scholarly communication, and campus collaboration Opportunities for libraries Electronic submission, storage, and dis­semination of student theses and dis­ sertations are growing more common in universities and colleges. For many libraries, ETDs (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) are the first targets for an institutional reposi­ tory program, and represent an opportunity to engage graduate students and their faculty advisors in broader conversation about open access, intellectual property management, long­term management of digital content, and other scholarly communication issues. ETD programs offer several potential benefits to students and institutions alike, including increased expressiveness and savings in cost and time. From the perspec­ tive of college and graduate school deans, however, the migration to ETDs raises several important issues. Foremost among them are concerns for preservation of the process of reviewing students’ thesis work and maintenance of the thesis as an integral part of the student record. The growth in ETD programs represents a cultural change in the practice of thesis deposit extending well beyond formatting issues. Graduate schools will continue to work collaboratively with thesis committees to ensure the aca­ demic integrity of work and to prevent the premature release of proprietary informa­ tion. Moreover, graduate deans also want to preserve their role as custodians of student records, ensuring through campus electronic archival and records policies that submitted ETDs are retained in partial fulfi llment of degree requirements. We encourage college and university librarians to recognize these issues as opportunities for engagement and dialogue with their academic administration on issues that are central to scholarly com­ munication. Institutions planning ETD programs should expect to address the role of UMI Dis­ sertation Publishing (a division of ProQuest) in its overall thesis/dissertation program, the concerns of some disciplines over the poten­ tial effect of open access to dissertations on future publication of the work, and questions about the preservation of multimedia fi les. This also means that institutions may want to work with students to review the essential ingredients of the students’ contracts with UMI to ensure protection of their work and, where patentable materials are included, the legal rights of patent holders. Potential benefits for students and universities • Expressiveness. ETDs can incorporate a wider range of media than printed dis­ sertations, allowing students to express their interpretations and research fi ndings through color imagery, audio, video, and interactive media. Contact Joyce L. Ogburn—series editor, cochair of the ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee, and university librarian at the University of Utah— with article ideas, e-mail: joyce.ogburn@utah.edu Richard Fyffe is Rosenthal librarian of the college at Grinnell College, e-mail: fyff e@grinnell.edu, and William C. Welburn is associate dean of the graduate college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, e-mail: welburn@uiuc.edu © 2008 Richard Fyffe and William C. Welburn 152C&RL News March 2008 mailto:welburn@uiuc.edu mailto:e@grinnell.edu mailto:joyce.ogburn@utah.edu • Visibility. ETDs increase the visibility of students and their advisors, potentially lead­ ing to improved job prospects or graduate school placement for students and better recruitment for colleges and universities. • Operational effi ciency. Theses and dis­ sertations typically begin life as digital docu­ ments. Accepting and storing them digitally can be more efficient for students and the institution alike. Students are relieved of the expense of printing multiple copies of lengthy documents, and university units are relieved of the inefficiencies of interoffi ce routing, collating, and storage of multiple copies. • Knowledge-sharing. Most institutions find that ETDs are being downloaded hun­ dreds if not thousands of times. By compari­ son, most printed theses and dissertations are seldom used. ETDs appear to be an effective way of sharing original research both across and beyond the academy. Strategic opportunities for libraries • Electronic authoring and scholarly communication. ETDs present an impor­ tant opportunity for helping students and institutions gain more experience with authorship in the electronic environment, and thereby addressing more directly key scholarly communication issues like intellec­ tual property, how theses and dissertations relate to other types of scholarly publishing (e.g., peer­reviewed books and articles), ef­ fective presentation of research results, etc. Further discussions can include how to get published, the market for scholarly mono­ graphs and articles, and how new scholarly authors can act as responsible participants in and contributors to that market. Students who go on to faculty positions will have been introduced to important issues that they will face as publishing scholars. • Institutional repositories. Many col­ lege and universities find senior theses and graduate theses and dissertations to be ex­ actly the kind of “intellectual output of the institution” that their local digital repository is intended to host, and target them for their initial implementation. Moreover, unlike most scholarly articles, theses and disser­ tations remain the intellectual property of the student author whether or not they are published by UMI (see below). Students often recognize the benefits of open­ac­ cess digital publication and are excited to participate in these projects. Open­access publication maximizes the visibility of their work and enhances the likelihood that it will be discovered and cited by other authors, and deposit into an institutional repository (unlike, for instance, posting it on a Web site) integrates it into a program of long­ term stewardship with a persistent address and greater likelihood of remaining usable in the future. Issues for campus discussion • Copyright management. Most universi­ ties allow theses and dissertations to remain the intellectual property of the student au­ thors, even if one of the requirements for the degree is that the dissertation be published in some form (for example, through UMI). UMI’s publishing agreement both stipulates that students both retain copyright to their original work and requires that students assert that use of any copyright­protected materials in the dissertation is authorized by the owner or falls under the copyright law’s fair­use defense. This presents an important opportunity for libraries and graduate schools to help educate students about copyright. It is increasingly common, however, that students will use in their dissertations materi­ als that they have previously published as journal articles and book chapters. Copyright education needs to begin earlier than the dissertation stage, since most students will not have made arrangements with their edi­ tors or publishers for permission to re­use this material. Libraries, teaching faculty, and graduate schools can, in consultation with college or university offices of research and legal counsel, help students understand the pro­ cesses of copyright transfer and negotiation March 2008 153 C&RL News of the terms of the author agreement, and can also help students request post­publica­ tion permissions by supplying templates of letters to publishers. Open access and the role of UMI Arguably, the benefits of ETDs are most fully realized if the works are openly available via the Web and common search engines. However, most universities with graduate programs have long­standing arrangements with UMI to publish and preserve their the­ ses and dissertations and index them through Dissertation Abstracts. UMI’s primary pub­ lishing platform is ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, an online full­text database available only by subscription. UMI also provides preservation services for the textual portion of its theses and dissertations (including works submitted electronically) using both microform and digital backups. Many researchers and graduate administrators consider indexing and publication through UMI an essential step in establishing the careers of young scholars. Recently, ProQuest/UMI has introduced an “open access” option (il.proquest.com /products_umi/dissertations/epoa.shtml). This option is defined in the ProQuest/UMI Publishing Agreement; students select open access or “traditional” (i.e., fee­based) pub­ lishing when they submit the dissertation through UMI. For a fee of $95, UMI will make the dis­ sertation freely available for discovery and access from its site, and provide an elec­ tronic copy to the author’s institution for open dissemination through a repository or Web site. Under the traditional publishing model, the student is eligible for royalties based on subscription and hard­copy sales; under the open­access model the student declines royalties. Students may elect to impose an embargo period with either the traditional or the open­access model. If open access is elected, institutions will wish to consider whether this is voluntary or prescribed institutionally, and whether the cost should be born by the student or cov­ ered by the institution. Institutions will also wish to consider whether the services and benefits offered by UMI are commensurate with the fee. The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) is “an interna­ tional organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic analogues to the traditional paper­based theses and dissertations” (www.ndltd.org/; ACRL is a member of NDLTD). NDLTD provides documentation on the creation and management of theses and dissertations in electronic form, and hosts an experimental union catalog of electronic theses and dissertations based on the OAI Protocol (rocky.dlib.vt.edu/~etdunion/cgi­ bin/index.pl). Access control, patents, and prior publication In some disciplines, open publication of theses or dissertations may be seen as premature, and may impede application for patents or publication of the work in a scholarly journal. To address this concern, some institutions incorporate access controls into their institutional repositories, to restrict access altogether or to the local campus for a limited period of time (an access “embargo”). UMI can also accommodate access embar­ goes. However, concerns over the effect of open access on future publication can be exaggerated. Dissertations that will later be published as books are likely to require extensive revision, and the open availability of the dissertation should not be presumed to undercut its future market. Librarians and graduate school staff should also anticipate the need for campus­wide discussion about the issue of access control and post­disserta­ tion publishing options. Preservation issues UMI requires that the textual portion of the­ ses and dissertations be submitted in PDF 154C&RL News March 2008 http:bin/index.pl http:www.ndltd.org http:il.proquest.com format, and most institutions that host theses and dissertations locally also require this. When properly formatted, PDF files have a good likelihood of remaining readable well into the future. (Proper formatting includes embedded fonts, use of non­proprietary file formats like TIFF and JPEG for still im­ ages, and not embedding multimedia fi les.) However, the multimedia files that so nicely enhance a dissertation’s expressiveness are less likely to remain usable over long peri­ ods of time. Students should be counseled to choose their file formats carefully and to structure their textual work so that it is compre­ hensible without the multimedia. At the same time, the importance of non­textual media creates an opportunity to encourage campus­wide discussion of the university’s archival responsibility for the knowledge it creates, the role of appropriate stan­ dards and metadata, and the collaborative development of an appropriate cyberin­ frastructure. A continued opportunity for collaboration Concern for the production, distribution, and retention of original research produced by graduate students has always been a point of potential collaboration between libraries and graduate schools. Thanks to emerging ETD programs and the increasing complex­ ity of the copyright environment in which we work, there is opportunity for fruitful agencies leading to serious campus discus­ collaboration between these two campus sion over the entry of new generations of scholars into the system of scholarly com­ munication. Selected university ETD sites California Institute of Technology: library.caltech.edu/etd/ Indiana University­Purdue University Indianapolis: https://idea.iupui.edu/dspace /handle/1805/199 University of Kansas: www.graduate. ku.edu/~etd/ University of Texas: www.utexas.edu /ogs/etd/ Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University: scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/ Other resources Copyright Crash Course Online Tutorial (University of Texas): www.lib.utsystem. edu/copyright/ Crews, K.D. New Media, New Rights, and Your Dissertation (ProQuest): www.umi.com /products_umi/dissertations/copyright/ Joan Lippincott, “Institutional Strategies and Policies for Electronic Theses and Dis­ sertations,” Educause Center for Applied Research, Research Bulletin vol. 2006 (13) June 20, 2006. Available at connect. educause.edu/library/erb0613 Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations: www.ndltd.org/ ProQuest/UMI Dissertations Submissions Site: dissertations.umi.com/ Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, ranked among the nation’s top five schools of education, offers innovative summer programs for education professionals, including: The Summer Institute for Academic Library Leadership July 6-10, 2008 Nashville, Tennessee For additional information or to begin an application for consideration as a summer fellow, visit our Web site at http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/ppi.xml or call (615) 343-6222. For priority consideration, applications are due by March 1, 2008. PPI has a limited number of IMLS- funded scholarships available for librarians from under-represented groups as well as leaders of libraries in historically black colleges and universities, tribal colleges, and Hispanic-serving institutions. March 2008 155 C&RL News http:dissertations.umi.com http:www.ndltd.org http:www.umi.com www.lib.utsystem http:www.utexas.edu www.graduate https://idea.iupui.edu/dspace