The presentations from ETD 2009 (Pittsburgh, June 10-13, 2009) are now online. Many of the papers are on OA.
See also the conference blog and Peter Murray-Rust's critiques (e.g. 1, 2):
... The whole meeting seems to be asleep about the urgency to liberate these theses into the digital Open. ...
[W]e are sitting on a goldmine of scientific information in academic theses and we are deterred from using them by copyright FUD. There is an implicit assumption that copyright is one of the god-given commandments – it seems almost revered here. ...
... Although there was some appreciation of the fact that theses now had a wider readership, there was little discussion of how they could enhance the visibility of theses. ...
The answer is simple. Create Open Theses in HTML and publish them. Use IR’s if you think that’s a useful way of making them permanent – but it’s not required. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 6/15/2009 08:55:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
