OpenDissertations.org provides institutions with an innovative approach to gaining greater exposure to ETDs within institutional repositories. An open access collaboration with EBSCO, the site:
It is free to become a contributing institution. Email opendissertations@bibliolabs.com to get started today.
Over 2 million records to date. Visit www.opendissertations.org and see how it works.
While most dissertations are freely accessible in digital form, for people not affiliated with research universities that subscribe to paywalled thesis databases, this emerging scholarship is frequently invisible. One way to make thesis and dissertation research more discoverable for interested readers worldwide is to offer print copies through online retail outlets such as Amazon.com, which has become the de facto “Books in Print” for English language materials. `
Many past and current graduate students who believe in open scholarship are eager to make print copies of their work available to interested readers on Amazon.com and other online retail sites. Some are even paying high-fees to “publishers” to make this happen. To satisfy this demand, BiblioLabs is offering a free service designed to facilitate wider discovery and print availability of this frequently undervalued scholarship. This optional service for students is simple and free to set up.
“It is our goal to make this scholarship searchable and easily located online. Though the digital copies in IR@UF are free to access around the world, some people still wish to obtain print copies for personal use, and BiblioLabs makes it easy to meet this demand.”
Judith C. Russell
Dean of University Libraries, George A. Smathers Libraries
University of Florida
Here is how it works:
With over 197 million users a month on Amazon.com alone, the result is broader discovery and access to research, especially for those outside of academe, showcasing your graduate school and demonstrating the public value of graduate education.
Schedule a consultation today and learn how this service can be implemented on your campus to benefit your graduate students, alumni, and citizen scholars around the world.
As culminating research projects in graduate education evolve to reflect new standards and technologies, many universities are reviewing their workflows for submission and review of theses and dissertations as well as accompanying materials, and they are finding options that did not exist when they established their current ETD processes.
Vireo, the open source ETD system developed with the support of an IMLS grant, by the Texas Digital Library has become a popular alternative to proprietary systems. It offers higher education institutions a highly customizable and flexible platform for managing all of the work related to ingesting, reviewing, approving and ultimately depositing works into the institutional repository and if desired to PQDT Global. Many top universities have adopted this solution, including the University of Texas, Texas A&M, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Illinois and Harvard University.
Beginning in 2019, BiblioLabs will be offering Vireo hosting and consulting services for libraries that would like to take advantage of the system’s unique features and would prefer to engage a third party to implement and/or host the system. Vireo saves time and duplication of efforts for librarians, students, graduate schools, and IR managers. It offers highly customizable data collection fields, and it can be customized at the individual department level. Seamless integration with institutional repositories, campus-wide student information software, and metadata enhancement tools can streamline previously cumbersome workflows.
For students the advantages are clear:
Institutions can enlist BiblioLabs to host Vireo for a low annual subscription fee or take advantage of BiblioLabs’ complimentary hosting services. Request more information today.