[GOAL] Re: Japan's National OA Mandate for ETDs.

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 9:28 AM, Syun Tutiya <tutiya at niad.ac.jp> wrote:

> Dear Peter,
>
> > Thank you for your interest.
> > In Japan, use of the licence is still at the individual level, the
> > national-level assessment has just begun.
> > (Currently, Copyright Act is only.)
>
> Just to follow up Makoto's response, let me add something.  Actually
> what Japan's Minstry of Education, Culture etc has done is a little
> tricky as far as open access is concerned.  Since many decades ago,
> doctoral degree awardees have been obliged to "publish" their theses,
> typically by publishing books or by contributing to scholarly
> journals. It goes without saying that those books and journals were
> printed ones because there neither online books nor journals. That was
> what the former version of the ministry's decree postulated by saying
> that theses shall be "printed and published."  The revised version
> says only that theses shall be "published,"  and adds that it shall be
> done on the Internet with aid from the degree awarding institutions.
> We expect this will result in open access to virtually all PhD
> theses, but there is no explicit expression of or reference to "open
> access" in the new stipulation, much less to copyright or licensing.
> We are aware there still so many adjustments to be made in so many
> related legal and operational areas.
>
> Hope this helps.
>

This is very useful.

This rest of this post applies to theses in all countries and I'd be
interested in practices everywhere.

We agree that this is a difficult area since different institutions and
different countries have a wide range of practices. There is also a balance
between the rights of the student, the university, the public and the
funding body.  Some countries (such as NL) have a centralized approach to
the provision of theses  - this makes it easy for the reader (including
machines). Others like UK are fragmented with almost as many policies as
there are universities - it is almost impossible to discover material in
their repositories unless you know precisely what you are looking for.

Theses are an incredibly valuable resource. They are obviously very highly
peer-reviewed and a great deal of work goes into the final version to make
sure it is high quality. However much material in theses is never published
elsewhere because the student loses contact with the supervisor. It is very
difficult to guess at the amount but even for those theses which result in
publications there is likely to be much more detail inside (which is often
omitted in formal publications).

Many of us would like to use machines to index theses and find the valuable
unpublished material. (At present no one can answer the question "Find
(most) chemistry theses in UK"). Machines can now index science - our
software could extract and index much of the chemistry in Japanese-language
theses since the diagram and chemical formula are universal. But to do this
we need to have explicit permission to download, read and index the thesis.
That is why machine-readable licences are critical. I'd be interested to
know how many institutions allow or even encourage Google to index them but
forbid other people.

Theses should be an important part of the Open Access activities but they
seem to be largely ignored.


> Syun Tutiya
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Syun Tutiya
>      Professor, National Institution for Academic Degrees and University
> Evaluation
> Address: 1-29-1 Gakuennishimachi, Kodaira, Tokyo, 187-8587 Japan
> Phone/FAX: +81-42-307-1803/1851
> Email: tutiya @ niad.ac.jp
> Web: http://svrrd2.niad.ac.jp/faculty/tutiya/
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-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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