ETD4OA. Electronic theses and dissertations for open access

International audienceThe poster presents a proposal for the European Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development. H2020 supports the achievement and functioning of the European Research Area in which researchers, as well as scientific knowledge and technology circulate freely, by strengthening cooperation both between the Union and the Member States, and among the Member States, in particular through the application of a coherent set of rules. Also, a set of activities aims at optimizing the use of national facilities by integrating them into networks and opening their doors to all European researchers.The project “Electronic Theses and Dissertations for Open Access” (ETD4OA) will support the coordination of European infrastructures and open access (OA) policies in the field of electronic theses and dissertations. Together with stakeholders and OA initiatives, it will address barriers and access restrictions, and it will take actions (active communication, recommendations, advice) to promote and develop input, openness and impact of ETDs in existing open repositories and portals. The objectives of the ETD4OA project are:1.to produce and disseminate reliable and consistent empirical data on the processing of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in a wide set of European countries with their different infrastructures and legal environments, in particular to address the problems and variations of access restrictions;2.to contribute to the coordination of open access policies regarding ETDs in the European research era and to build a sustainable European community focusing on the open access to research theses;3.to contribute to the understanding and development of the acceptance, uptake and usage of open access ETD infrastructures, by the research communities, by industry and business and by the Internet community;4.to develop practical and helpful guidelines and recommendations in order to raise awareness about the challenge, and to support cooperation with developing regions and countries, in order to increase the part of ETDs which are widely and fast disseminated in institutional repositories without any restrictions as the standard solution.The European infrastructure for this already exists, with the interconnection of institutional repositories and other open archives and concurrently registered which can be searched by the DART-Europe portal. The ETD4OA project has not the ambition to develop a new infrastructure or prototype. Instead, today, the problem of open access to ETD lies upstream in local contexts that facilitate decisions in favor of embargoes or restricted access (on-campus access, intranet). To put it in a simple way, pipes exist, but it lacks the fuel and the pressure.The input to the central portal varies depending on the country and the research field and the institution. To increase the OA-percentage is a problem on many levels, technical (workflow) as well as legal, administrative (regulatory) and tradition and ethics. The answer proposed by the project is awareness raising, lobbying at the national and European policy level, a thorough communication net both for candidates as well as for the responsible local staff, as well as the production of training material for them.ETD4OA aims at increasing the use of national facilities, i. e. institutional repositories and OA infrastructures, by integrating them into an emerging network of the people, those responsible and involved for European research theses. Its aims are to exploit synergies between national and Union initiatives by setting up partnerships between relevant policy makers and funding bodies or advisory groups, in order to facilitate the development of global research infrastructures and the cooperation of European infrastructures with their non-European counterparts (in particular US and Russia), ensuring their global interoperability and access.Some of the research questions the project will address: Which are the (apparently) increasing demands by the authors for keeping the document not open to the public for fear of copyright infringement, e. g. of figures used? Is there increasing pressure of commercial publishers to not allow OA distribution if a book is planned? Are there more recent other ways of posting an ETD in OA which are not seen and thus not counted by the institutional repository network, such as for instance institutional servers, personal websites, gold OA journal publications? Language barriers may lead to publish a thesis as a book to make use of the publisher's editorial office.The project is coordinated by the GERiiCO laboratory at the University of Lille 3 (France) and the ISN Oldenburg (Germany). Actually more than ten member states take part in the project, represented by public or private institutions, experts and networks. ETD4OA has been submitted within the H2020 project call H2020-INFRASUPP-2014-2, “Support to innovation, human resources, policy and international cooperation”, a sub call of the H2020-INFRASUPP-2014-2015 program