From Today’s Launch Announcement:
OpenDissertations.org, the project from EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) and BiblioLabs, has gone live. More than 800,000 Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) are now available for public search and discovery, with more than one million expected by June.
EBSCO Open Dissertations is committed to providing open and free access to ETD metadata and content. In addition to the fully open website , EBSCO will include ETD metadata in EBSCO Discovery Service to facilitate access and improve content discovery for researchers.
With more and more universities now hosting and distributing their own ETDs on the open web, EBSCO and BiblioLabs have created a service that freely aggregates and exposes this valuable content. EBSCO Open Dissertations extends access to any interested researchers worldwide and drives traffic to Institutional Repositories.
BiblioLabs CEO Mitchell Davis says the project is open to libraries around the world, and some of the first data made available for public search includes ETDs from across the U.K. that are included in the British Library’s EThOS Service. As UKSG 2018 approaches, he says there could be no better time to launch. “We are working to drive more discovery of U.K. ETDs through this project, and what better time to launch than ahead of this important U.K. Higher Ed. event. The British Library has been an amazing innovation partner working with us for years, and this project is an exciting way to extend our partnership.”
Davis says the response from libraries is letting BiblioLabs and EBSCO know they are on the right track. “We know from the number of libraries that have committed to join the project (especially the reactions we have seen in such a short time) that we have hit on a real need. We intend to build on our work with EBSCO and libraries in a way that supports the ETD community and this stream of research for the long term.”
More than 30 institutions from four continents are currently participating in the EBSCO Open Dissertations project. These institutions represent more than one million dissertations that will be searchable from www.opendissertations.org. Since the project was launched in November, more than 50 institutions have reached out to discuss the project and commit resources.
EBSCO Information Services’ Senior Vice President of Product Management Michael Laddin says the positive response to the project in such a short time shows that EBSCO Open Dissertations is meeting a real need to make ETD information more accessible. “We are committed to supporting more open source software models in the library industry. With OpenDissertations.org, we are creating new partnerships-say-hello-to-opendissertations-org/w content discovery paradigms around which EBSCO and libraries can partner more closely, and we are working with BiblioLabs to unlock that potential.”
Direct to OpenDissertations.org
See Also: New Projects and Partnerships: Say Hello to OpenDissertations.org (November 9, 2017)
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