Scholarly Communication at Texas A&M

A hot-off-the-press announcement [sent yesterday as a detailed email to graduate schools; today available as an official press release on their website] from ProQuest reveals that they will no longer charge institutions for uploading electronic theses and dissertations to the ProQuest digital database. This cataclysmic change will go into affect on September 27, 2010 for all clients who use the ProQuest ETD Administrator tool to handle the transfer of ETD files and metadata to the company. This means a savings of $65/$55 per dissertation or thesis, respectively.

For institutions not using the proprietary upload tool, fees will still apply. Also, the option of publishing the ETD via Open Access will still cost $95. per document, regardless of submission method.

Once the shock wears off over this announcement, an analysis on what this development means for scholarly publishing, libraries and the ETD community will be forthcoming. I promise! For now, it’s enough to celebrate this windfall reduction in cost for graduate students.

The Texas A&M Digital Repository has been in the news lately! The story about how the Libraries cataloged more than 2300 ETDs was picked up by both the Texas Digital Library blog and newsletter, and by the Duraspace blog.
Read all about us!

Texas A&M Adds 2300+ ETDs to DSpace Repository

Texas A&M Libraries catalogs 2300+ ETDs

And don’t forget to the visit the repository! http://repository.tamu.edu

The University of Central Florida (UCF), a global public research university with comprehensive graduate programs at the master’s and doctoral levels, has announced that their students’ electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) will soon be made available “to a much wider audience”. Beginning in Fall 2010 UCF ETD’s will be contributed to freely accessible national and international databases including the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) and the Worldwide ETD Index. In addition, UCF ETDs will be made available to web crawlers to show up in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

As part of this change in administrative process, submission to the fee-based repository operated by ProQuest/UMI will not longer be required and will not be included in the University’s routine ETD submission workflow. Individual colleges or schools may continue to require that students submit their dissertation to ProQuest/UMI on their own. Additionally, students are welcome to contribute their thesis or dissertation to additional repositories including Open Thesis, Internet Archive’s Text Archive, or subject specific repositories. Further information about the University’s new ETD submission process are available from the Library website.

In making the change to fully Open Access ETD submission and publishing, UCF joins a number of other North American institutions who no longer require graduate students to send their work to a proprietary publisher. Others in this category include Stanford University, University of Texas at Austin, Virginia Tech, University of Tennessee (Knoxville), Louisiana State, Laval University, and the University of British Columbia.

The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) announced that there are now over one million readily available electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) online worldwide.  The NDLTD (www.ndltd.org), OCLC (Online Computer Library Center, www.oclc.org), VTLS (www.vtls.org), and Scirus (www.scirus.com) maintain and provide access related to the NDLTD Union Catalog (www.ndltd.org/find), of ETDs available in institutional repositories around the globe.

The NDLTD, of which Texas A&M University is a member, is an international non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the creation, dissemination, use, adoption, and preservation of digital theses and dissertations. The NDLTD assists students and universities in using electronic publishing and digital libraries to more effectively share knowledge in order to unlock potential benefits worldwide.  The NDLTD also promotes student efforts to transform the genre of the print dissertation through the use of innovative software to create cutting edge hypertext/multimedia ETDs.

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