Speaker Sessions: Abstracts

A growing number of universities are beginning to require the digital deposit of their thesis and dissertation output in their institutional repositories. At the same time, a growing number of universities as well as research funders are beginning to mandate that all refereed research must be deposited too. This makes for a timely synergy between the practices of the younger and older generation of researchers as the Open Access era unfolds. It also maximizes the uptake, usage and impact of university research input at all stages, as well as providing rich and powerful new metrics to monitor and reward research productivity and impact. It is important to integrate universities' ETD and research output repositories, mandates and metrics as well as to provide the mechanism for those deposits that may need to be made Closed Access rather than Open Access: Repositories need to implement the "email eprint request" Button for all Closed Access Deposits. Any would-be user webwide, having reached the metadata of a Closed Access Deposit can, with one click, request an eprint for research purposes; the author instantly receives an automatic email and can then, again with one click, authorize the automatic emailing of one copy to the user by the repository software. This feature is important for fulfilling immediate research usage needs during any journal-article embargo period, and it also gives the authors of dissertations they hope to publish as books a way to control who has access to the dissertation. Digital dissertations will also benefit from the reference-linking and book-citation metrics that will be provided by harvesters of the distributed institutional repository metadata (which will also include the metadata and reference lists of all university book output). Dissertation downloads as well as eprint-requests will also provide useful new research impact metrics.

The academy is defined by its commitment to the ongoing production of new knowledge through research and scholarship. Yet, knowledge that is not transmitted, effectively does not exist. Dissemination of new knowledge is now far less constrained than in the days of paper-based publishing, but the new capability brings new responsibility for academic and research institutions to shape their infrastructure, policies, and cultures to ensure the broadest possible dissemination of knowledge now and into the future. Not merely traditional forms of scholarly works but a range of new products in new forms must also be considered. A recent statement from leading higher education organizations has articulated strategies for campuses to pursue to promote dissemination of the new knowledge produced by their communities of faculty, staff, and students. Policies like those adopted by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and MIT suggest that a culture shift is under way – with institutions obtaining limited rights in works created on campus. But policy is only part of the picture. Dissemination infrastructure has been blossoming on campuses. New kinds of publishing and dissemination services are developing rapidly. What are the implications of these and related developments, and what underlying trends do they point to?

In the print world, libraries have carried responsibility for preservation. In the digital world, the responsibilities grow to include moral and legal dimensions. As stewards of the intellectual record, librarians must ensure that the valid, authentic digital record is sustained over time. Copyright law defines the rules for preserving digital materials; yet, those laws sometimes conflict with the library's moral imperative. This paper discusses the conflicts and recommends actions for consideration by the library community.

Cybernetic communication has deeply altered the notion of text as well as the way we relate to it, and the three basic elements at the foundation of any human exchange, that is the sender, the message and the receiver, are naturally implicated in this fundamental mutation. The paperless text supposes a re-definition of the axis of communication for it implies a new conception of both production and diffusion, especially within Academia, where a text is never just a text, but represents rather a contribution to a wider field of research, or a necessary step towards graduation or promotion. The re-positioning of the sender and the destinatary within the academic axis of communication is directly related to the nature of the message itself which, by becoming digital, affects the conception of information in relation to its reception: as the nature of the message has mutated, so have those of the sender and the destinatary. Naturally, this new axis of communication is yet still to be fully comprehended and assimilated within the pre-existing academic structure, for it forces us to reconsider many values and notions which had been taken for granted before the cybernetic revolution. Is an essay in a digital form as valid and legitimate as its hard-copy counterpart? Can faculty direct theses and dissertations without taking into account their radically new scale of diffusion? Can scholars protect intellectual property when projected onto the digital field? Within Academia, these questions are not merely cultural, but professional as well; hence the need to address them as the digital revolution is still unfolding. The sender of a scholarly message today must conceive his or her endeavor in function of a radically different destinatary, and the message itself is directly affected by the new quality of this exchange. The former axis of scholarly communication, upon which the entire academic structure was based, is slowly dissolving into a wide-open digital axis of exchange, challenging most accepted views in regard to scholarly and academic publishing. Some considerations, such as those related to university politics or to tenure and promotion, as mundane as they might appear, cannot be neglected as we re-define the entire structure of scholarly communication, for they play determining roles in the understanding of faculty’s reaction when confronted to the inevitable triumph of digital diffusion.

The programming language, JAVA, which transformed the Internet, was introduced to the world at the Netscape Developer’s Conference in San Francisco over thirteen years ago on March 5-7, 1996. At the time, those of us present were told that the future would require three dimensions for every resource we produced: everything would have to be interactive, ubiquitous, and distributed. A resource is said to be “interactive” when the user provides significant input or direction and the resource reacts dynamically and appropriately. A resource is said to be “ubiquitous” when it (or a major component of it) is both available everywhere and recognized everywhere as the best means of addressing the problem it is designed to handle. A resource is “distributed” when its components and the responsibility for them are variously located, and not required to reside on a single server. A complete acquisition of these three properties still drives the development of the Internet and these same properties should drive the development of dissertations online more surely than they now do, but it’s important to keep all three dimensions in perspective, to remember what a dissertation is for, and to understand a variety of needs tied to dissertations in order to aid our effort to move the development of ETDs and to bring dissertations to the next level. The NDLTD is striving to be ubiquitous, but it has not reached that point, nor has it neared the tipping point that would precede it; certainly, we can say that ETDs are distributed via the NDLTD, but a certain amount of fear among dissertation writers and directors has worked against fully open access and distribution. When a dissertation is embargoed to a single institution or campus, it is not distributed. Finally, I come back to the first term, interactive. Our theses and dissertations are, by and large, digitized paper documents utilizing PDFs, and every theorist I know of the future of textuality will argue for the advent of interactive dimensions that we have not tried to develop. I see the shortcomings in these dimensions as symptoms of a problem that derives from two related situations: we dissertation-producing faculty seem agreed only in seeing a dissertation or thesis as the production that will certify a single student’s degree, which diminishes collaboration to even less than the amount a good typist provided before the days of word-processing; moreover, we use the term “to publish” as loosely, if not more loosely, than we use the term “to edit,” to the degree that, most of the time when we speak to each other about these things, we’re talking about entirely different concepts. Not only do we need to remedy both of these openly and in an organized fashion in order to advance the production of ETDs generally and the NDTD specifically, but we need to do so in order to advance the forms scholarship should generally be taking at our universities, colleges, institutes and laboratories.

This paper will explore the incidence and impact of ETD’s and Open Access in China and the broader region. The markets are very different from Europe and the Americas. A survey has been completed for this paper and the results will be presented. The presentation will reveal a picture of uneven development across the region. It will show great interest in these matters but uneven strategic commitment to this development at this particular time. The pressures on libraries in this region are different and the degree of collaboration is still emerging.