This paper presents an empirical analysis of ETD-ms compliance of the metadata associated with the 5,949,744 ETDs in the NDLTD Union Catalog. ETD metadata records were harvested from the NDLTD Catalog using the OAI-PMH protocol and, subsequently, an analysis was conducted to determine compliance to the ETD-ms metadata standard. In addition, to provide contextual overview of the potential root causes of non-compliance to ETD-ms, a case study was conducted at a Higher Education Institution, in order to understand current practices and procedures employed during ingestion and association of metadata quality. The study could potentially provide direction on issues to be addressed during the ingestion of ETDs into IRs

University Library “Svetozar Marković” possess’ several collections of doctoral dissertations defended at the University of Belgrade and other universities in Serbia or abroad. In particular that includes: current doctoral dissertations, deposited in the Digital repository from 2012, collection of doctoral dissertations digitized retrospectively on users’ demand, and, finally, and the collection of old Serbian dissertations divided into two sub-collections: defended by Serbian scientists on the foreign universities and defended at the University of Belgrade at the beginning of the 20th century. The challenges may differ, but the copyright issues are identified as crucial for each one of them.

Institutional repositories of theses and dissertations require a high quality metadata to make its items relevant, discoverable and shareable. There are numerous metadata standards available with predefined metadata tags/fields for describing documents in a digital repository. In our study, the data is collected from the Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR), to observe Institutional Repository software installed by universities, then examine the metadata item record of a thesis and document its distinct attributes. Preliminary study indicates that the countries having a large number of ETD repositories indexed in OpenDOAR have quality metadata. For each item their metadata record provides DOI, Copyright Statement, Degree Date awarded, use of controlled vocabulary and their repository interface maintains Researchers Profile, Altmetrics score alongside students’ thesis. Some of the repositories are also having recommendations or findings of theses listed as separate entity. It was observed that in some repositories they mention about the supplemental materials and research data availability and integration, further details of which will be discussed in the paper.

Graduate students, as potential future full-time researchers, should show proficiency in data sharing because it provides credibility, increases impact and prepares students for grant writing. We compared the FAIRness of non-traditional research outputs (supplement materials) associated with theses and dissertations shared by individual students, with those shared through an institutional repository. Those shared in an institutional repository were significantly FAIRer and had higher views per month. We conclude that graduate students as a population are not yet proficient in applying the FAIR principles. And that they would measuarbly benefit from the review process that is part of most institutional repositories.

The activities of the Slovenian Social Science Data Archives (ADP) are presented for the implementation of open data policies at PhD school of University of Ljubljana. The activities are part of the Archive’s broader efforts to promote open science and a culture of data sharing that underpins transparency and advancement of knowledge. ADP draws on best practices and domain standards developed within CESSDA. Through the University of Ljubljana example, we aim to show the obstacles at several steps of the implementation of the policy and the benefits of the collaboration between the archive and the university.

The dissertation plays one of the key roles in defining the quality of doctoral studies on faculties and universities in Serbia. National Repository of Dissertations in Serbia (NaRDuS) was developed in 2014 due to absence of systematically approach in deposing thesis and unclarified process of applying for defending thesis. To support the efforts of initiative for Open Science in Serbia, at its beginning, NaRDuS expended its scope and was implemented in compliance within recommendations for Open Science.

Open access to dissertations in institutional repositories has been shown to increase the impact of academic research and scientific findings; yet, institutions of higher education provide mechanisms for students to restrict access to or embargo their work for a certain period of time. Reasons that institutions provide embargo options vary. This study aims to identify and categorize these reasons through a qualitative approach.

2:00 – 2:05 – Introduction 
2:05 – 2:40 – Highlights from the “ETD Lifecycle Management Best Practices” (Meinhard Kettler)
2:40 – 2:45 – Q&A
2:45 – 3:00 – Student and University ETD Deposit agreement best practices (Charles Greenberg)
3:00 – 3:05 – Q&A
3:05 – 3:15 – Attendee open discussion / continued questions
3 :15  – Adjourn

• Dr. Sukanta Kumar Patra and Mousumi Patra. Harvesting ETD Metadata from ‘Shodhganga’ to National Digital Library of India: present scenario and implementations
• Manoj Kumar K and J P Singh Joorel. Indian Research: Policies and Practices to Enhance the Quality of Research through Indian Open ETD Repository
• Kamani Perera and Anushka Earskin. ETDs for Research and Development in the Field of Human Resource Management (HRM) in Sri Lanka
• Vladimir Otašević and Biljana Kosanović. The importance of persistent identifiers in implementing FAIRness principles of dissertations in Serbia
• Emmanuel Eseyin. Students’ Post Plagiarism Experience and Resilience for Quality Research Activities in Nigerian Universities
• Dragana Stolic and Vladimir Marković. The centralized originality check of the doctoral dissertations at the University of Belgrade: a model of a controlled and transparent procedure
• Dr. Sukanta Kumar Patra and Mousumi Patra. South Asian Open Research Repositories and NDLTD’s Global ETD Search
• Dr. Md. Zillur Rahman and Kamani Perera. ETDs: A powerful tool for research data overview from Sri Lanka & Bangladesh
• Rozita Petrinska Labudovikj, Anastas Mishev, Hristina Spasevska. University Repositories and Their Significance for Scientific Research: The Case of the Repository of the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje
• M A M Mominur Rahman. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) in Rajshahi University Central Library, Bangladesh: Status, Challenges and Future Plan.
• Manmeet Kaur and Rajesh N Bhatt. Scenario and status of ETD e-Infrastructure in Indian academic libraries

Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) contain valuable knowledge that can be useful in a wide range of research areas. Accordingly, we are building electronic infrastructure leveraging advanced work on digital libraries, for discovering and accessing the knowledge buried in ETDs. In this paper we focus on our work to incorporate topic modeling into digital libraries for ETDs. We present ETD-Topics, a framework that extracts topics from a large text corpus in an unsupervised way. The representations learnt from topic models can be useful for downstream tasks such as searching and/or browsing documents by topic, document recommendation, topic recommendation, and describing temporal topic trends (e.g., from the perspective of disciplines or universities)

Research ethics and data protection are being given a very high importance, and universities need to provide the necessary guidelines. Moreover, they need to ensure that these guidelines are adhered to by their researchers for the protection of the research subjects, the researchers, and the university itself. On the other hand, care must be taken so that the research ethics review process is kept as streamlined as possible. In this paper, we describe URECA – the online review platform that was developed by the University of Malta to streamline its research ethics review process, thus simplifying matters for the researchers/students, the reviewers and also the auditing committees.

This paper will review phases of introduction and use of ETD at the University of Novi Sad with special emphasis on specific requirements, challenges and further directions of development and use of ETD systems at the UNS.

https://www.terasa.rs/

This systematic review is based on academic work published between 2016 and 2022 at The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. The descriptors related to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) are to be found in title, summary and/or keywords. The result shows that there are few academic studies on FAIR principles; the University of Porto and consequently Portugal are most intensive in FAIR data research. Dissertations and PhD theses are predominant; information and computer science is the field of study most correlated with FAIR. Keywords: FAIR principles. NDLTD. Systematic literature review.

The current study presents an analysis of the 16972 citations in the Social Work of 79 ETDs available at TISS, Mumbai @IR during the period 2001 to 2019. The EDTs of Social Work were analyzed to understand how the references sources have changed, once the internet reduced the search cost and efforts for citing the reference sources with the advent of latest tools availability. The findings reveal a striking contrast in terms of sources of references used by the students’ pre and post internet era. The first ranking journal ‘Economic and Political Weekly’ has been cited 450 times.

The paper will seek to establish the challenges that continue to block the establishment of a National Repository of Theses and Dissertations in South Africa, as a central repository of ETDs from all universities in South Africa. It will also attempt to leverage the value of the repository networking and integration, to equip repositories with a wider array of roles and functionalities, which can be enabled through new levels of web-centric interoperability.

The significance and value of doctoral theses as unique and distinct academic research records have long been well established and institutions have been intent on making these documents more widely available and open for valuable research purposes than traditional hardbound copies can allow. Technological advances have helped this shift but the recent COVID-19 pandemic, and the measures put in place to reduce the spread of the virus, interrupted existing thesis submission workflows. These measures have forced academic institutions into a much quick adaptation to a new wholly digital environment, than perhaps was planned.

At University of Glasgow, we recognised that this was an opportunity for change while being aware that there are many challenges associated with electronic publishing of theses that need to be addressed. In early 2022 we began our journey to update our current hardcopy thesis deposit policy to one which reflects our successful shift to e-only theses and to consolidate the changes which COVID-19 required since March 2020.

In this talk, I shall give a brief overview of the issues and challenges facing the project team at the University of Glasgow, on our journey to the move from a hardcopy theses environment to a fully electronic one. These challenges relate to the entire lifecycle of electronic theses (e-theses): from approval and submission, to documentation, cataloguing, copyright and embargoes, access, and long-term preservation. I will consider some of the practical aspects that we have learnt and the stakeholders we have worked with. Finally, I will touch on some of the more philosophical questions that we have been engaged with.

Announcement of the ETD Leadership winners

Presentation of the next ETD conference venue

All attendees are welcome to join us on walking tour