<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 9:28 AM, Syun Tutiya <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:tutiya@niad.ac.jp" target="_blank">tutiya@niad.ac.jp</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Dear Peter,<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> Thank you for your interest.<br>
> In Japan, use of the licence is still at the individual level, the<br>
> national-level assessment has just begun.<br>
> (Currently, Copyright Act is only.)<br>
<br>
</div>Just to follow up Makoto's response, let me add something. Actually<br>
what Japan's Minstry of Education, Culture etc has done is a little<br>
tricky as far as open access is concerned. Since many decades ago,<br>
doctoral degree awardees have been obliged to "publish" their theses,<br>
typically by publishing books or by contributing to scholarly<br>
journals. It goes without saying that those books and journals were<br>
printed ones because there neither online books nor journals. That was<br>
what the former version of the ministry's decree postulated by saying<br>
that theses shall be "printed and published." The revised version<br>
says only that theses shall be "published," and adds that it shall be<br>
done on the Internet with aid from the degree awarding institutions.<br>
We expect this will result in open access to virtually all PhD<br>
theses, but there is no explicit expression of or reference to "open<br>
access" in the new stipulation, much less to copyright or licensing.<br>
We are aware there still so many adjustments to be made in so many<br>
related legal and operational areas.<br>
<br>
Hope this helps.<br></blockquote><div> <br>This is very useful. <br><br></div><div>This rest of this post applies to theses in all countries and I'd be interested in practices everywhere.<br></div><div><br></div><div>
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.<br>
<br></div><div>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). <br>
<br>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.<br>
<br></div><div>Theses should be an important part of the Open Access activities but they seem to be largely ignored.<br></div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<br>
Syun Tutiya<br>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>
Syun Tutiya<br>
Professor, National Institution for Academic Degrees and University Evaluation<br>
Address: 1-29-1 Gakuennishimachi, Kodaira, Tokyo, 187-8587 Japan<br>
Phone/FAX: +81-42-307-1803/1851<br>
Email: tutiya @ <a href="http://niad.ac.jp" target="_blank">niad.ac.jp</a><br>
Web: <a href="http://svrrd2.niad.ac.jp/faculty/tutiya/" target="_blank">http://svrrd2.niad.ac.jp/faculty/tutiya/</a><br>
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</div></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Peter Murray-Rust<br>Reader in Molecular Informatics<br>Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry<br>University of Cambridge<br>CB2 1EW, UK<br>+44-1223-763069
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