Dear Ken,
Thanks for your explanation. Great you are embarking on this project. Useful to academia and potentially also useful to government and industry for evaluating investment in design research.
My comments that follow are based on a some experience of web document projects ranging from www.allaboutdesignresearch.com (an 18 month testbed for web functionality for possibilities for the Design Research Society website), sundry document storage websites, and more recently a large-scale member-only access document collation funded by ALTC/OLT in Australia for a consortium of universities.
Some issues you’ve probably already considered that don't appear in your excellent description but might be relevant:
1. It could be inferred your overall intention is to break copyright. The implications of that need to be looked at separately and legally.
2. Double the project outcomes for free. Create a new role of 'critical research reviewer'. Make it a condition for anyone accessing the collection to provide some feedback. Then you have:
a) Both a collection and critical review (double the resource)
b) Instant open access for *anyone*, provided they commit to providing feedback
c) Potential for a managed online critical discussion that can itself be analysed much as can be done with JISCMail
3. How will funding work long term for maintaining the collection? As far as I can see this project would only work as a commercial ongoing project. All universities will cut back on funding ongoing web services as soon project funding finishes. (How many of the DRS conference proceedings disappeared from university websites...) . Do you have or are you considering commercial partners? If so, I suggest many would like to know who, in terms of their participation and support of your project.
4. Puzzled. What's the deal about having a secure documentation online host? This is pretty ordinary and this kind of subscriber restricted document web hosting can be built in a couple of days, a week at most on any reliable server hosting. I prefer RackSpace but Amazon seesm pretty good..
5. Doing this as a single small team in one university sounds about the right scale for this project as a university project. Last year one project I undertook was similar document collation website project for several universities in Australia and the team size was 3 plus the Cis in each university.
6. Puzzled as to why this is a multi-million dollar project? My company creates websites with this kind of functionality for $5000-$10,000 for university research teams. Content collection and collation is where the costs are but this can be done by contributors at almost zero cost...
7. Please could you release more details? As a collaborator that sent you my PhD some time ago, it would be nice to have access to the website now it is up and running. It would also be good to have pointers to the documentation setting out the project.
Best regards,
Terry
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Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI
Director,
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken Friedman
Sent: Sunday, 12 October 2014 7:13 AM
To: PhD-Design
Subject: Re: Call for Doctoral Theses in Design
Dear David, Cameron, and Moh,
First, let me explain the collection. This is a collection all all doctoral theses in design that we can locate from any accredited university or PhD program, as well as those doctoral theses awarded in nations that award a doctorate in design under some other designation such as DEng, DA, DDes, etc.
Moh is right to say that this would be a great resource to make available to all doctoral. We cannot do so, and I will explain why below. This is nevertheless, not a major impediment, and I will explain why. There are no fees either to contribute to or to use the collection. The fees that Cameron mentions sound like the publication fees for the journal Design Science, one fees for members of the Design Society, one fee for others. That is a different project entirely. We charge no fees to use this collection.
At the moment, there are many different repositories of doctoral theses. Some are open source and freely accessible — if you can find them, and it is not always easy. Others treat thesis projects as documents, hidden within other collections. Some work on a university basis, some by faculties or departments, others as national repositories. None seem to be complete or comprehensive. The largest single repository is a paywall protected collection that we can only access either by purchasing each thesis ourselves, which we cannot afford to do, or by getting copies one by one from authors.
The reason we do not make this complete available open source is the these materials are protected under different copyright and access regimes. As nearly as I can determine, project collaborators may use and read project materials without restriction and without violating copyright law. Thus, we invite those who wish to collaborate to do so.
While I would like to see this become a freely accessible resource, that is a question I cannot yet answer. To make a digital repository freely available as an open access resource, we’d have to solve the copyright problem for each thesis in the collection. This is a massive administrative project, and I don’t at this time have funding for the work this will take. The second problem is that we would have to find a host institution. We’ve spent a lot of time and money locating a reliable hosting service for the collection we have to date — this is a secure documentation host service, not an open access web site. To ensure security and access, we must register and grant access to each collaborator on an individual basis. Within the scope of our project, this makes sense, as this is only one to a dozen or so libraries we have collected for the CSIRO Design Capacity Mapping Project. Much of the content in the other libraries involves copyrighted articles and protected resources: the copyright holders are publishing firms that will not make their documents accessible on an open access basis. I had to find a way to let our collaborators use and benefit from all of the materials we are collecting without violating copyright laws. This was a sensible compromise.
These projects to date represent several years of work identifying, gathering, and organising these resources before getting the project funded and funding Heico’s position — and a solid year of work since. We still deal with structural and archival problems on a daily basis. To the degree that we can share, we are eager to do so — but we are only one small project at a single university. We cannot yet solve problems that require either 1) a consortium of universities, 2) a university library with server space and professional library support, or 3) a research society such as the Design Research Society.
This is not the first time I have tried to build this kind of repository. I made an attempt once before, and I even had full funding and a commitment to long-term support and maintenance. Back in 2008, when I was a dean, I persuaded my Vice Chancellor and our director of libraries to grant us funding for a massive repository of doctoral theses. I argued for the fact that it would make a major contribution to the field, and that serving as host would being us visibility and rewards far in excess of the costs, thus justifying the expenses.
The collection basis would have been almost the same. We would have included any legitimate doctoral thesis from any accredited university or doctoral-level design school. All material would be been filed, catalogued, and made accessible in standard formats with the benefit of full search tools for title, author, year, abstract, and the like. This would have been an open access collection, completely public, freely accessible, and it would have required no registration.
At the time, I tried to involve several of my fellow deans in Australia and around the world, as well as querying several research societies. No one was interested in joining the effort. Some people felt that it was a bad idea for any of several reasons. The reasons were mostly irrelevant, but these were their reasons and choices for not taking part. A few people were somehow worried that allowing one university to host such a collection would somehow benefit that one university in a way that would be unfair to others — or that we might somehow give greater place to projects by our graduates. This last argument puzzled me, as the “any thesis” rule meant that the greatest space would go to the largest and longest-established programs, not to the host. It is true that we would have had the honour of our visibility as host — that what the VC would have been getting for an investment of several million dollars, rather like a university that sponsors an annual solar car competition or a business or not-for-profit foundation that funds a major prize.
Since it seemed impossible to get enough interest to make a full open-access collection possible when I had the funding, I reluctantly put it aside for a time when I might have time to try again.
That time is coming now. First, we must build the collection. If any organisation, university, or consortium of universities, deans, etc., wants to work with me to make this collection accessible open-access on a properly maintained university site, I am happy to work together to see this happen. For now, we are building the collection, and it is accessible at no cost to anyone who is willing to work with us as a collaborator. There is no cost beyond helping us to stretch our “stone soup” budget by adding a thesis.
PhD students have an easy way to join. Nearly everyone getting a PhD has downloaded or purchases a few digital theses from one of the existing collections. If you have not yet finished your thesis and wish to use our collection, just add to the collection. It’s a bit like those 19th century lending libraries where anyone could join the library by contributing a book. You did not have to write or publish a book to join — you simply had to bring a book to share with the other members.
Would I prefer to build this as a total open access library without registration? Yes. I tried it once and even had the funding that required. At that time, no one was prepared to participate. It’s nearly a decade on now, and perhaps the time is right. I don’t have funding I once had, so this time, I am only collecting the material. I’m ready to collaborate with anyone who is able to work with us to make this useful resource a fully-accessible, web-based open access collection. From what I learned, that will require two or three years of concerted administrative and legal work, but it can be done.
In the meantime, Heico and I seek individual thesis projects or access to collections. We are happy to register collaborators one at a time and grant them access to the full collection. It’s not the best system, but we’ve done all the work necessary to build a system that works effectively within the constraints of copyright law and our staffing capacities.
Best regards,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University Press | Launching in 2015
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology ||| Adjunct Professor | School of Creative Arts | James Cook University | Townsville, Australia ||| Visiting Professor | UTS Business School | University of Technology Sydney University | Sydney, Australia
Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
Telephone: International +46 480 51514 — In Sweden (0) 480 51514 — iPhone: International +46 727 003 218 — In Sweden (0) 727 003 218
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