Dear colleagues

We are pleased to announce that bookings are now open for the Workshop on DataCite, DOIs and Theses, to be held at the British Library on Friday 16 January. Please go to this EventBrite page to register for this free event:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/datacite-dois-and-theses-tickets-14920615964

This workshop continues our discussion towards a national approach to DOIs for doctoral theses. The workshop will first provide an introduction to DataCite and DOIs for thesis or repository managers who are new to the area of minting DOIs; and will then dig deeper into one possible approach currently being considered at University of East London. The morning session will be a learning opportunity for attendees, while the afternoon session will be more participatory and will seek feedback on the UEL outline proposal, and continue to develop a national approach to DOIs for theses. The workshop is open to all, and you are invited to join for the full day, or just the morning or afternoon. For the afternoon, we would particularly welcome a mixture of both new faces and participants from our earlier exploratory meeting held on 28 November. A summary of that meeting is provided below.

We look forward to seeing some of you at the workshop on 16 January.

Best wishes

Sara Gould

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Report from Exploratory Workshop: A national approach to persistent identifiers for theses, 28 Nov 2014.

This was an initial exploratory workshop which kicked around the many reasons why “DOIs for Theses” make sense – and the challenges to reaching a cohesive system across all UK theses.

On the one hand the task seems easy: many institutions already assign DOIs for other material such as journal articles or datasets, so theses might fall easily into existing DOI workflows. On the other, the very nature of PhD theses brings specific challenges: not formally published, held locally within a repository but with possible variant (redacted) versions in EThOS, PQDT, FigShare and elsewhere; wide ranging submission requirements between institutions, or between departments within an institution; print or e-born, or a bit of both; and the involvement of many institutional stakeholders like academic committees. And, the benefits of DOIs for theses are not so obvious outside the library or repository environment.

We agreed early on that by ‘identifiers’ we mean DOIs, and that DataCite is likely to be the most appropriate (but not the only) service provider. DataCite can certainly be used for content types other than ‘data’, including theses. Our initial conclusions:

·         A strong desire to agree a national approach. More so than with other research outputs, there is a shared sense of the need to manage the UK’s PhD theses responsibly and as a long-term commitment, at a national level. While each institution would probably mint its own thesis DOIs, it would be great to be able to assign DOIs consistently, and follow agreed guidelines and workflows across all institutions.

·         Benefits. A clear, non-technical articulation of the drivers behind a system of DOIs for theses would support colleagues in advocating the benefits to their institution stakeholders.

·         It is good timing to be thinking about thesis DOIs now. Institutions are being required to develop Research Data Management plans and indeed data repositories. The connection between theses and underlying research outputs are clear and strong.  PhDs are often the first research output to be generated and it would make sense to establish a strong system for DOIs early on.

·         DataCite. Exactly how are DOIs assigned? What is the DOI structure, what is the workload, the level of technical knowledge required, and what is the cost? And where does CrossRef fit in?

·         There would be little benefit in the British Library (EThOS) minting DOIs for all UK theses because the DOI needs to connect to the ‘version of record’, usually held by the institution. But some sort of BL DOI service for smaller institutions might also be useful, especially if some PhD authors would otherwise see their theses less frequently cited or downloaded due to the lack of a DOI process at their institution.

·         Generating the DOI. It is quite simple to visualise how a DOI could be included as metadata element during record creation, but the DOI would ideally also be included in the thesis itself, or at least the cover sheet. That would ensure good indexing by Google Scholar and others.

·         Constituent parts of the thesis. If the thesis gets a single DOI, how do we handle appendices, multiple volumes, variant or redacted versions. And one of the main benefits would be the ability to connect with the underlying data behind the thesis, so we need a way to assign an appropriate level of granularity to DOIs for thesis, its sub-sections and related content held elsewhere.

·         Accessibility of the thesis. If we can relatively easily define a DOI workflow for ‘standard’ theses, the devil is often in the detail and any national approach should also think about embargoed theses, theses which are taken down, digitised theses that may have redacted parts, theses which have more than one version available, and many more scenarios.

·         An end-to-end mapping of thesis workflows is urgently needed, to help understand at which point the DOI would most likely be added, and to develop a lifecycle model for theses for a whole range of uses.

A small number of firm actions emerged from the meeting, and the first of these is to offer a wider workshop to continue the discussions and bring more voices to the table.

Sara
Sara Gould
Development Manager, Services for Researchers
The British Library

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