FAQs for Institutions

A: EThOS aims to make the full text of UK Doctoral theses available to any researcher, regardless of where they might be. It offers a single point of access to theses (both digital and not-yet digital) and an ordering facility for theses that are not yet available in digital format, all via a web interface. The system, in partnership with UK HEIs, is based around a Central Hub hosted at The British Library. The content is built by harvesting records from institutional repositories, and by digitising paper based theses. Any HEI regardless of size or number of theses can participate in EThOS. There are associated costs with EThOS, to support the digitisation facility. EThOS has a supporting role in the transition from print to electronic theses and in helping HEIs expand the available content.

A: EThOS works in partnership with member Institutions to open up access to theses.

The handling and supply of theses has in the past often been time consuming and an expensive but necessary service offered to researchers. HEIs will enjoy the economies of scale offered by EThOS, which will prepare theses for delivery for all participating institutions thereby keeping costs and overheads to a minimum and thus ensuring best value for money

At a local level, participation in EThOS will include practical benefits such as the removal of reprographic tasks from within your institutional library and freeing up staff to concentrate on other tasks (e.g. other research support activity).

Another concern for HEIs is preservation, and theses within EThOS are archived securely and backed up which is of enormous benefit.

As well as these direct benefits, the central hub provides a shop window for your institution’s postgraduate research output, highlighting your areas of strength. Making the work of the institution known to researchers the world over could lead to increased investment and increased interest from students.

A: EThOS has the infrastructure in place to

• Harvest e-theses from your institutional repository (if you have one)
• Digitise paper theses as required
• Return your digitised theses to you for loading onto your institutional repository (if you have one)
• Preserve e-born and digitised theses in perpetuity.

A: The UK HE community mandated responsible open access at a very early stage of this project in order to make UK doctoral theses readily available and free at the point of use. Material, once digitised, is openly accessible to all. There is a simple process of registration for researchers who wish to download the full text or request a physical copy of the thesis. EThOS will also provide links to institutional repositories.

A: There are four participation options which have been developed to allow participation of all institutions regardless of size or number of theses produced and to support Open Access. Each institution needs to explore which option is the most appropriate for their local circumstances. Each option has its own benefits with some benefits common to all. If you are unsure which is the most appropriate way for your Institution to participate, please contact the EThOSnet Advocacy Team.

Institutions can get involved as follows:

1. Read the toolkit (including the Participation Options and the Technical Requirements for harvesting) to gain an understanding of EThOS and decide which participation option is most appropriate for your institution.
2. Read the Memorandum of Understanding and decide whether you can fulfil the obligations (particularly over the timetable for supply of paper theses for digitisation).
3. Complete two copies of the Memorandum of Understanding on pages 1, 3, 18, 19 and 20 with your institution details. EThOS needs an administrative contact, who will be responsible for overseeing your institution’s involvement with EThOS (often a member of library or repository staff), and an email address for the person or team that will be handling thesis requests from EThOS (often the document supply team).
4. For Open Access Sponsors, confirm how much your institution wishes to contribute. EThOS recommends contribution levels based on JISC banding and past requests from the British Thesis Service. Contact us to discuss your institution’s position.
5. Arrange payment according to the details on page 19. Please note the commitment is for three years.
6. Print off 2 copies of the Memorandum of Understanding, and have the Library Director (or equivalent) sign both copies and send them to:

EThOS Administration
c/o Carol Burton
The British Library
Boston Spa
Wetherby
West Yorkshire
LS23 7BQ
or Fax: 01937 546286, FAO Carol Burton

What happens once the Memorandum of Understanding has been signed and sent to the British Library?

1. The British Library will process the payments and return a copy countersigned by the British Library’s Head of Operations and Customer Service (or equivalent), which will confirm your membership and include your institution reference number, which should be quoted on any correspondence with EThOS.
2. If you have an institutional repository, EThOS will begin the process of harvesting your metadata and theses into the central hub.
3. All participants will be contacted by the EThOSnet Advocacy team to establish what further support you would like to promote the EThOS system in your Institution.

A: The collaborative nature of the project means that there is a range of options to suit HEIs regardless of size or the number of theses they produce. HEIs can participate whether or not they have an institutional etheses repository. The options are also flexible so that within a minimum commitment level, institutions can move from one option to another as their local circumstances dictate. A summary chart is available and a full description of the different options.

A: The key features are as follows:

* Open to all UK HEIs
* All harvested e-theses (*see note) or those digitised as a result of a digitisation project are supplied Open Access with no cost to the institution or the researcher
* Theses are digitised once and are made available on-line and Open Access to all who wish to access them from then on.
* Any thesis digitised by EThOS will be available for download by the originating institution and load to their own repository.
* Metadata and e-theses (*see note) can be harvested from the HEI Repository or loaded manually using the Web Service.
* The HEI chooses its participation option (see options above).
* Preservation in perpetuity is offered by The British Library for those theses stored on and offered via EThOS
* The option to sponsor additional digitisation projects to meet local HEI priorities.
* The option to switch between schemes should circumstances change e.g. if the budget for Open Access runs out and no further funding is available, the institution can switch to one of the other schemes e.g. researcher pays. See the descriptions above for further details.

Note: For Associate Member Level 3, only metadata will be harvested

A: This option enables institutions to budget for their involvement with EThOS, as the contribution, a minimum initial commitment of three years, is paid in advance but in a manner which is convenient to your institution (annually, lump sum, etc), The contribution then guarantees a set number of theses being digitised based on user demand for specific titles.

Should your full contribution value not be used, the remaining funds can be used to digitise additional theses chosen by your own institution and by being an Open Access Sponsor you will have a higher priority for any additional digitisation projects. EThOS will help you monitor your usage and membership level as the system progresses to ensure you are getting the best value for money. Other features of this level of membership can be found in the description of the Open Access Sponsor option.

A: Suggested contributions are shown in the Participation Options for Open Access Sponsor. These levels are flexible and the sum paid is at the discretion of your institution i.e. you may pay at a level to ensure that the anticipated volume of digitisation of requested theses will be covered. The EThOS team can help you with analysing past demand.

Associate Member Level 1 participants will contribute retrospectively.

A: Fund usage will be monitored throughout the year and your institution will be kept up to date on usage through regular reports. Should your theses prove very popular and more theses are ordered for digitisation than your participation option will deliver, you have the option to contribute more funds or switch to another participation option when the funds run out. See the section on Participation Options.

If your contribution is not used up, you will be able to select a set of theses equal to the number required to use up that contribution. You will be informed in plenty of time if this option is likely.

Information on quotas is included in the Participation Options.

A: You can request recent figures from the EThOSnet Advocacy Team via info@ethos.ac.uk.

A: Your payment method will differ depending on which membership level you have chosen. Payment details (EThOS account details, etc.) are given within the Memorandum of Understanding.

A: EThOS is based on collaboration between the Central Hub and the participating HEIs. The aim of EThOS is to demonstrate the quality of primary UK research to researchers the world over, and your institution’s contribution. In order to achieve this we need to supply the researcher with the information they require as efficiently and professionally as possible.

The aim of the Memorandum of Understanding is to state the roles, expectations and requirements of both parties involved in the supply of a thesis to a researcher. It is not a contract as such, but if the terms and conditions are not met, it will reflect badly on the institution and EThOS as a whole.

A: No! Your Institution pays only for the digitisation of your own theses as they are demanded by researchers. We will report regularly on the theses digitised from your institution and usage of funds deposited.

A: Yes each institution can receive copies of its own theses for loading onto the institutional repository once the item has been digitised and made available on Open Access.

A: Yes, paper copies will be returned direct to the host institution intact unless your institution requests otherwise (e.g. some institutions hold duplicate copies and will send these to EThOS, to be destroyed after digitisation). The decision rests with the host institution and is clearly stated when the paper thesis is sent to the British Library for digitising. Prices differ depending on whether your institution wishes to receive a copy back or not.

A: No, you may not. Before you download a thesis you will have to accept terms and conditions of use. These conditions allow use of the thesis for individual and non-commercial use only. Your institution’s theses are protected in exactly the same way.

A: There are several ways in which Institutions can submit theses to EThOS.

• Allowing the harvesting of your e-theses : Metadata and e-theses can be automatically harvested by EThOS from your institutional repository. Metadata and e-theses must be presented in a simple standard form - plug-ins are available for the most popular repository softwares and the standard is defined here
• Digitisation of paper theses on-demand : when a researcher orders a thesis which is not already digitised, the system will automatically send an email to the institution to ask for supply of the paper thesis. The institution sends the thesis to the central hub where it is digitised and returned to the institution.
• Metadata from The British Library catalogue : if you have submitted title pages to the British Thesis Service in the past, the metadata derived from them will be loaded to EThOS from The British Library catalogue.
• Title pages – for those institutions continuing to collect paper theses, EThOS will continue using manual methods of recording these theses. That is we will accept title pages (often submitted as a photocopy together with the Abstract) with an attachment of an author's permission form. The thesis will then be catalogued from the title page on the BL's Integrated Library System and the record will be transferred to EThOS from there. So records for institutions which continue in the short- or long-term with paper based systems can be included on EThOS.
• e-Title pages – We are currently investigating opportunities to collect title pages in electronic form. This will allow us to cut and paste the information quickly and easily into the system and, most importantly, to include abstracts. The inclusion of abstracts will make your theses more ‘findable’ as the system will support keyword searching of all metadata. We are also considering the benefits of digitising abstracts from title pages supplied on paper.

A: EThOS requires e-theses records to be exposed via the OAI interface of your Institutional Repository in the UKETD_DC metadata format.

The steps needed to create and expose records in UKETD_DC are detailed in the Guide to using an existing repository and the Guide to setting up a new repository

To check that your OAI interface is exposing UKETD_DC correctly, you can use the OAI-PMH ListMetadataFormats? verb. Type into a browser:

[Your OAI baseURL]?verb=ListMetadataFormats

If all is well, you should see a bunch of XML including:

<metadataFormat>
<metadataPrefix>uketd_dc</metadataPrefix>
<schema>
http://naca.central.cranfield.ac.uk/ethos-oai/2.0/uketd_dc.xsd
</schema>
<metadataNamespace>
http://naca.central.cranfield.ac.uk/ethos-oai/2.0/
</metadataNamespace>
</metadataFormat>

If uketd_dc is not shown as an available format, you will need to check against the installation steps detailed in the Guides above to determine which step(s) you have missed.

A: It is not the place of EThOS to restrict the creativity of authors or the technologies required to render their ideas. There is therefore no restriction on the format of harvested e-theses. However, you should remember that if unusual software is required for your thesis, it may be that a researcher cannot view it.

EThOS will digitise paper theses to TIFF format for preservation and Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (or PDF) with OCR’d text for searching and supply.

A: A separate project is underway to digitise the most popular 12,000 theses currently held on microfilm. These will seed EThOS when it goes live. The microfilms will NOT be digitised, as the digitisation project is scanning from the paper originals to ensure high quality images.

A: EThOS will replace the current British Thesis Service.

A: EThOS will replace the current microfilm- and print-based service at the British Library. This will have the following implications:

A) Outloans and related supply

All enquiries and requests that BL receives for access to theses at your institution will be re-routed via EThOS. If the full text of the thesis is not already available, your nominated EThOS contact (which may or may not be the same as your ILL/Document Supply contact) will then receive a request to supply it for digitisation via EThOS. Details of this supply arrangement are given in the Memorandum of Understanding.

There will no longer be any voucher system applied to these transactions. Depending on you institution's membership status with EThOS (see Participation Options), the thesis will either count as part of your digitisation quota, or the digitisation costs will need to be charged to your institution or to the requester.

If in exceptional circumstances you cannot supply that particular thesis to EThOS, you must let EThOS know. If you cannot supply it for web access but are willing to lend the paper copy of that thesis, please also indicate this and EThOS will then advise the requester to apply for a conventional direct loan, via whatever appropriate channels are available to them.

You may also continue to receive direct thesis loan requests from institutions other than BL. It is your choice whether to supply them in the conventional way, or (in the case of Doctoral theses only) to route the requester via EThOS.

B) Inloans

If you require a thesis from another UK HEI, on behalf of one of your readers, you may direct the reader to look for it via EThOS. There will not normally be any charge to the reader for downloading the thesis (depending on the supplying institution's policy). If the reader prefers to order a printed copy or an e-copy burned to disk, EThOS makes a charge for supplying items in this way. EThOS anticipates that most institutions will expect the requester to pay for this optional additional service, but it is your choice whether you offer to pay for it from your document supply budget (online credit/debit card transactions only).

If in exceptional circumstances the HEI cannot supply that particular thesis to EThOS, and if the thesis is not subject to any other restriction on access, you will need to apply for a conventional direct loan of the paper copy of that thesis.

Requests for theses from overseas will not be affected by EThOS.

A: It is important to EThOS to have sufficient full-text content available from day one to meet the expectations of researchers searching for UK doctoral theses. EThOS is approaching this challenge in four ways:

1. by using a JISC awarded capital grant to fund the digitisation of at least 12,000 popular titles available through the current British Thesis Service over recent years to seed EThOS before it goes live.
2. by digitizing UK Doctoral theses on demand from researchers so that over time, EThOS will build up a collection of theses that are required by readers worldwide.
3. by providing advice and support for institutions to acquire new theses in electronic format, as they are completed by students.
4. by, if capacity allows, undertaking additional projects to digitise selected theses on an institutional basis using the British Library digitisation studio.

A: Each institution has a different understanding with its authors about how theses are disseminated, but in the vast majority of cases, authors are happy to make their work available to others. It is up to the originating institution to decide whether they want to approach authors to gain specific permissions to digitise their theses. The approach of EThOS is to digitise theses without necessarily receiving permissions from the authors on the following basis:

• The intention of EThOS is to promote the work of the author and institution of UK doctoral theses
• The service is run on a cost recovery basis. That is no one is benefiting from the supply of the theses other than the author and the institution (by making the quality of their work known).
• It would be impractical to contact all authors of all existing theses in a bid to obtain clearance for supply.
• The system offers an immediate take down policy should any author have cause to complain about the supply of their thesis

Legal advice and advice from Higher Education colleagues has been taken and the advice is that it is extremely unlikely that the mitigating factors and actions listed above would not be enough to satisfy an aggrieved author.

Many institutions are attempting to contact authors in general terms such as notices in alumni magazines (see the example which can be used) and mailshots which request that authors contact them if they do not wish for their thesis to be digitised. A small number of institutions have taken the steps towards contacting individual authors. For further advice please contact the EThOS advocacy team.

A: The intention of EThOS is to promote the reputation of authors and their institutions. No-one is profiting financially from the supply of theses.
EThOS assumes that the vast majority of authors of past theses are happy to have their theses distributed via the service as it replaces the existing British Thesis Service. Should an author or other rights-holder object, EThOS has a rapid take-down procedure and will remove the thesis with immediate effect.

When making theses available authors must be encouraged to take into account any third party material that may be contained and ensure that they have sought the necessary permissions of the copyright holder. Further guidance on issues associated with Copyright and Third Party material is available in this Toolkit, or should be obtained from your own academic institution.

Each thesis within the Central Hub has an End User Licence Agreement to remind users that the work is copyright of the author or third parties. The Licence reminds users that they must credit the original author in any use they make of the thesis, and that they may not use the work for any commercial purposes.

EThOS recommends that HEIs use an agreement form for all future author submissions, which will allow for the dissemination of theses via EThOS and/or your institution’s Repository. Such agreements need to be built into your own thesis deposit procedures as soon as practicable regardless of whether you have an Institutional Repository or not. Recommended text can be found in the Downloads area.

EThOS requires that a researcher is registered before an order can be made for a thesis (see above). This means that the service can track who the thesis has been supplied to in the event of author rights being abused.

These measures have been built into the system to meet concerns expressed by UK Higher Education colleagues during the requirements analysis for EThOS and during an independent study commissioned by JISC at the end of the original EThOS project.

A: Submitting a thesis in electronic form for the web can often raise concerns about plagiarism. However, these concerns should be set in the context of the risks associated with the traditional submission of a paper copy of a thesis. The problem is not with the copying in itself, but whether there is plagiarism or improper re-use without giving proper credit to the author, or asking permission. Up until now, any plagiarism that might have occurred from paper copies of theses has had a good chance of remaining hidden.

Electronic documents make any plagiarism far easier to detect than that from paper copies, and so could actually act as a strong deterrent. If someone wishing to plagiarize can find something on the web, this also means their supervisor, employer or publisher can also find it.

There are a number of measures in place to help protect authors from plagiarism.
EThOS requires that a researcher is registered before an order can be made for a thesis (see above). This means that the service can track who the thesis has been supplied to in the event of your work being plagiarised.

Each thesis within the Central Hub has an End User Licence Agreement attached to remind users of the restrictions placed on the item. Users must agree to these terms and conditions for every thesis supplied. EThOS also submits its thesis content to the corpus of material used by the major plagiarism detection services. This means that newly submitted work by other students and writers can be checked against existing theses (and other material held by the service).

A: One of the aims of EThOSnet is to assist UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) with the changes required in order to accept current and future theses in electronic form. Changes which may need to be addressed can be found in the toolkit.

A: There are examples of documents such as a deposit agreement, take-down policy, etc. in the Downloads area.

A: Yes. The British Library will ensure preservation of all theses offered via the EThOS service, whether harvested from institutional repositories or digitised by the service. This preservation service is a key feature of EThOS.

A: Embargo periods for individual theses are specified at the awarding Institution. EThOS deals with theses which have embargoes in one of two ways:

• Non supply of Theses : Individual institutions can choose not to supply the thesis until the embargo period is over. There is no mandate on submitting theses to EThOS! Institutions need only supply the theses they wish to supply. So if a thesis contains sensitive information which authors do not wish to disclose then the theses should not be submitted until the author is comfortable in doing so.
• Each record on EThOS may contain an embargo date and reason – Institutions that expose metadata about an embargoed thesis will need to complete the date of (and if appropriate, the reason for) the embargo and then the service will not harvest the thesis metadata and any associated bitstreams until the embargo has been lifted.
• Where a thesis is only partially embargoed, EThOS will harvest the record and any available bitstreams.

A: The EThOSnet project is making good progress towards the launch of EThOS at the start of the academic year in 2008. There will be some preliminary testing and other work well before then so keep coming back to the website.

A: There are a number of partners and stake holders actively engaged in the EThOSnet project.

The primary partners are the British Library, University of Birmingham, Cranfield University, University of Glasgow, Robert Gordon University, Imperial College London and University of Hull.

Stake holders include the Association of Heads of University Administration; National Library of Wales, Repositories Support Project, SHERPA and the University of Wales. The secondary partners include University of Nottingham and University of Warwick.

A:

• The EThOS toolkit, which offers practical help on all subjects covered within these FAQs. You do not have to be involved with EThOS to use this toolkit.

• Your own institution’s liaison with EThOS – all institutions which contribute to the EThOS service will have a contact point, usually a repository manager or member of library staff.

There is Help available on the EThOS service website at http://ethos.bl.uk

Wider information can be found on the internet where a number of EThOS presentations and papers can be found, though many of these may now be out of date and all current information will be contained within the toolkit.

Sources such as the JISC Repository Support Project and www.opendoar.org contain information on repositories and wider technical support, and open source repository software can be found at:

• Eprints
• Dspace
• Fedora

A: There is a mail list you can join called E-THESES-UK@jiscmail.ac.uk which is UK discussion list for electronic theses and dissertations including the EThOS project. Further details of the list, including joining instructions and archives, can be found at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/E-THESES-UK.html