ETD Release Policies

On Friday, September 30, I'm presenting a paper on ETD release policies at the 8th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (or ETD2005 for short.) My paper is titled ETD Release Policies in American ARL Institutions: A Preliminary Study. I've also put related items into my TxSpace collection, including a pre-print of the paper, an Access database with links to each institution, an Excel spreadsheet with finer-grained data about 28 institutions, and the Powerpoint presentation that I'm giving at the conference.

The conclusion of the paper is that early implementers of ETD collections have implemented a diversity of release policies which may have negative consequences for the broader development of a networked digital library of ETDs. The policies themselves are widely divergent, as is the vocabulary we use to describe access levels. There may also be negative consequences concerning digital rights management.