Restricted vs open access for electronic theses and dissertations - a challenge for public science

Academic electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) should be openly accessible to serve best the scientific progress, and inform the scientific community as a whole on the results. This is technically supported at universities by their institutional repositories, by global open archives, and by some publishers. Over the years the percentage of ETDs which are open access (OA) is rising worldwide and in all scientific disciplines. Open, stated Peter Murray-Rust in his keynote at the ETD2014 conference at Leicester, UK, should be the default, not the exception. However, the reality is different. Even in institutional repositories (IRs) created to provide access to the scientific output of an academic institution and as a central sector of the so-called green road to open access, more or less important parts of the scientific production are missing. This is because of lack of awareness, embargo, deposit of metadata without full text, confidential content etc. ETDs, in particular, are disseminated with different status types – some are freely available, others are under embargo, confidential, restricted to campus access (encrypted or not) or not available at all. Contrary to the OA philosophy, many IRs are not fully OA (Prost & Schopfel 2014). But while other papers may be available through alternative channels (journals, monographs etc.), ETDs most often are not. Our paper summarizes empirical evidence from different studies and describes some main results from a small French-German survey. It proposes a conceptual approach designed not only for a better understanding of access restrictions but also for action and policy-making to increase the part of ETDs to be open access. At the end, the paper will present the outline of a European infrastructure project called “Electronic Theses and Dissertations for Open Access” (ETD4OA) to be submitted in the framework of the Horizon 2020 program.