Unifying ETD with open access repositories

The fundamental proposition of this paper is to argue that ETD collections should be unified with institutional open access repositories, where they sit alongside other forms of research output. This change from separated collections confers the following benefits: * Better accessibility and searchability, leading to greater impact and citation rates * Better archival processes * Value can be returned directly to the thesis authors to help in their research planning * Easier provision of bibliometric information about access * Lower operating costs through use of one software system, one data store, and reduced training * Redundancy in Internet access paths. The paper examines each of these claims and substantiates them. The practice of separate ETD collections may have arisen from paper-based practice, and the paper argues that this should be challenged. An actual implementation of a unified ETD collection is also discussed, with actual data on its performance. Software was written that allowed the Australian Digital Theses Program (ADTP) to harvest research theses from a unified institutional repository running GNU Eprints. This software was tested with ADTP, and will be used by the University of Tasmania. The University of Melbourne has already adopted the software and serves up theses to ADTP from its own Eprints repository. The software is available to any university under a GNU open source license. This implementation has allowed the measurement of accesses and a range of useful data, which are available to the thesis author. Examples of this type of data and the information that can be derived from it will be discussed. Since some theses are available on the Internet via ADT, the UTas repository, and the ARROW Discovery Service, comparative information on searchability can be demonstrated.