UCL home page

UCL LIBRARY SERVICES

Library home » About us » Current & ongoing projects » Influencing the Deposit of Electronic Theses in UK HE

Spacer

UCL Library Services

 

 

Influencing the Deposit of Electronic Theses in UK HE

News, February 2012:
Updated survey report now available as Barnes, T and Moyle, M and Brown, J and Sadler, K (2012) Electronic doctoral theses in the UK: a sector-wide survey into policies, practice and barriers to Open Access. A joint UK Council for Graduate Education - UCL Library Services publication.


The aim of the ‘Influencing the Deposit of Electronic Theses in UK HE’ project was to encourage HEIs to prioritise changes to their policies and practices that would result in electronic versions of their newly-awarded PhD theses being available on an open access basis from their institutional repositories. The project was commissioned by the JISC and ran in Summer 2010 as one of a pair of concurrent and complementary e-theses initiatives, the other strand being the British Library’s ‘Gathering evidence of the benefits of increased visibility and impact of open access theses’ project, which gathered evidence to assess the impact of the EThOS service.

The project conducted a survey of UK HEIs, to capture a snapshot of current and planned electronic theses policies and practices in UK HEIs, and to gather evidence about the main barriers to the electronic deposit of e-theses. 144 HEIs responded to the survey, including 19 members of the Russell Group, 17 members of the 1994 Group, 23 members of Million+ and 21 members of the University Alliance.

The project also carried out four case studies on the theme of electronic thesis mandates, working with institutions who were either in the formative stages of mandating the deposit of electronic theses or who had already implemented electronic theses mandates.

The following project outputs are available for download:

Summaries of best practice:

The findings of the project were also reflected in updates made by the team to the EthOS Toolkit.

The project team is grateful to the four case study institutions:

  • Aberystwyth University
  • Brunel University
  • The University of Glasgow
  • The University of Sussex
UCL logo JISC logo

Last modified 17 December 2010