Welcome

A small but growing number of European and American empirical studies on ETDs reveal figures on access restriction. Even if they are not confidential, one part of ETDs are limited to on-campus access and/or under embargo for several months or years. There are different reasons, e.g. individual choices, publishing projects, legal aspects and so on.

Together with different European institutions, we prepare an international research project that, if funded by the EU Horizon 2020 program, will provide in two or three years guidelines for good practice and contribute to the creation of an European infrastructure for open access to ETDs.

For the preparation of this project called EDAR (E-Dissertations: Access and Restrictions) we conduct a survey with a number of academic libraries and graduate schools in France and Germany, in order to get some basic data on the situation. The project team includes the Institute for Scientific Networking at the University of Oldenburg in Germany (Pr. Eberhard Hilf) and the GERiiCO laboratory at the University of Lille 3 in France (Joachim Schöpfel), with funding and technical support from the European Social Sciences and Humanities Research Institute at Lille (MESHS).

We have selected a representative sample of 60 academic libraries and graduate schools in both countries. The aim is to collect and analyze information

1) on the present status of the workflow, acceptance, access, and local communication of the open access posting and archiving of PhD theses and dissertations.

2) on the local habits and rules for handling restricted access to theses, such as embargos and on-campus access.

The survey is anonymous. Feedback on the results will be given to all participants.