RSP e-theses briefing papers

The RSP have made a number of reports and briefing papers authored by UCL, regarding e-theses concerns available on their website: http://www.rsp.ac.uk/help/publications/#briefing-papers (they can be found near the end of the page). The papers cover:

Influencing the Deposit of Electronic Theses in UK HE. Report on a sector-wide survey into thesis deposit and open access
Influencing the Deposit of Electronic Theses in UK HE, Appendix. Full text responses from a sector-wide survey into thesis deposit and open access
Vision, Impact, Success: mandating electronic theses. Case studies of e-theses mandates in practice in the UK Higher Education sector.
Third party copyright
Impact on future publication
Managing embargos
Plagiarism
Policies and guidelines available on the internet
Sensitive content
Workflow analysis

E-thesis & Dissertation Bibliography

Digital Scholarship have released version 5 of their E-thesis and Dissertation Bibliography.

'This selective bibliography includes articles, books, conference papers, technical reports, unpublished e-prints and other scholarly textual resources that are useful in understanding e-theses and dissertations.'

Digital Scholarship have also collated bibliographies relating to:

Institutional Repositories
Digital Curation and Preservation
Open Access Journals
Scholarly Electronic Publishing

OA Week Competition winner: Misha Jepson, Glyndŵr University

We are pleased to announce Misha from Glyndŵr University as our OA Competition winner!!

Misha’s engagement story described the use of advocacy to both gain the attention of an institution’s senior management team and to effectively put across the benefits of a repository to an institution. The story showed the importance of the ‘Elevator Pitch’ advocacy technique in grabbing opportunities where you can to get your case heard. It also showed how aligning the use of the repository with the institution’s strategic aims can embed the system within an institution’s structure.

A copy of Misha's winning story is available here.

RAE data available for download: JISC MERIT project

A new resource which may be of interest to those who are looking to use their institutions’ RAE data to populate their repository and/ or other publication management systems.

The JISC MERIT project has just launched its RAE submissions database which contains data on every UK institutions’ RAE submission.

The database offers faceted searching on the citation data held by: institution; Unit of Assessment; output type; author. The results of any combination of these searches can then be exported and saved to Excel files.

From what I can see the database only holds citation data. It does not seem to offer full-text, links out and/or DOI look ups.

Open Access Week Competition

The week of Monday 18th - Sunday 24th October has been allocated as Open Access Week across the globe. Now in its 4th year, this dedicated week aims to promote 'Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research'.

To mark the occasion we at the WRN are running a competition for partners with an Open Access theme. We are looking for your best repository success story. Whether it's a story of success convincing an academic researcher to interact with the repository, or a tale of success regarding a deposited item that ended up proving the wide-reaching audience of the repository.

Entries can be as long or as short as you want and we are looking to put the best stories together in a blog post and perhaps even in a new advocacy learning object!

The competition is open from now until the Friday before Open Access Week (15th October). There will be a prize available for the winning entry.

Good luck!

Learn about other Open Access Week events, contests and resources through http://www.openaccessweek.org/.

Repositories and CRIS article

An article has been published in the latest issue of Ariadne about the Repositories and CRIS event we ran in Leeds in May this year. ‘Learning how to play nicely: Repositories and CRIS’ is available from http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/wrn-repos-2010-05-rpt/.

The full contents of the journal issue, which may also be of interest, including articles on e-books, Library 2.0 and data management is available from http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/#main-articles.

Annual growth figures now available

Just a quick post to let everyone know that I have now collated our latest batch of statistical data which means we now have growth figures covering a full 12 month period. Overall, we have seen a very healthy 43.73% growth in the number of items within our repositories over the past year - well done all!