Open access to all doctoral dissertations at Temple University

(via Open Access News) Temple University has decided to provide open access to all its doctoral dissertations, starting with those completed August 2008 as Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian announced only a few days ago.

You can browse and search the archive on the Temple University Electronic Dissertations website. A quick search revealed that there are already two anthropology dissertations available:

Carolyn P. Merritt (2008): Locating the Tango: Place and the Nuevo Social Dance Community [link removed upon request by author]

Jay F. Gabriel (2008): Objectivity and Autonomy in the Newsroom: A Field Approach

Bell explains:

Many other leading research universities have created similar “open-access” electronic dissertation repositories and have found that cutting-edge doctoral research is more frequently read and cited as a result of making dissertations globally available in an open-access repository. For example, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln recently reported their open-access dissertations are downloaded sixty times more frequently than are restricted versions offered through the institutional subscription to Digital Dissertations.

He writes that the Libraries will no longer add paper copies of Temple dissertations to the Library stacks nor will it collect dissertations on microfilm.

>> see the official announcement by Temple University

“I hope that all universities will consider an Open Access mandate for electronic theses and dissertations", comments Peter Suber from Open Access News. Furthermore, Temple should consider an Open Access mandate for peer-reviewed journal articles by faculty, for example, like the Harvard policy.

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ScientificCommons.org - The Open Access Search Engine

essays.se: Open access to Swedish university papers

A year ago, I wrote Already lots of publications in the open access anthropology repository Mana’o but it seems that the project is dead as the website has been down for several weeks now.