At the July 2016 NDLTD Board of Directors meeting in Lille, Sara Gould, EThOS E-Theses Service Manager at The British Library, presented the UK country report:

Here are some UK ETD highlights for 2016:

 

EThOS (e-theses online service) http://ethos.bl.uk now contains 437,000 theses, around 90% of all UK theses. There are links to open access copies of the full texts for around 187,000. Most of the remaining 250,000 EThOS records can be ordered for digitisation on demand.

Proquest continues to offer thesis digitisation projects to UK research institutions, scanning theses at very good rates in return for permission to include them in Proquest subscription databases. Digitised copies are also returned to the institutions for adding to their open access repositories, and EThOS can also harvest the full works, so there are benefits to all concerned.

 

Open access mandates for publicly funded theses continues to be implemented gradually. EThOS data is included in the outputs reporting system Research Fish which is used by all public research funders – this makes it easy for people to report their thesis in their ResearchFish submission. An API is now being built to support this further.

 

Content mining, non-traditional doctoral theses, and ORCiD and DOI identifiers are other areas in which we’re making progress through various projects.