Friday, 2 May 2014

St Andrews thesis ranks highly in EThOS downloads chart


We are delighted to report that a PhD thesis written at St Andrews over 30 years ago has been the second most downloaded thesis from EThOS in March 2014.

‘The Gospel of Thomas and the earliest texts of the synoptic gospels’ by Kenneth V. Neller, who sadly passed away in January last year, has been downloaded 18 times this March. Owing to the kindness of Dr Neller’s widow, who gave permission in his name for the thesis to be uploaded as an Open Access thesis to our institutional repository, Research@StAndrews:FullText, we were able to make it available to researchers and students from all over the world.

Dr Neller’s thesis has been downloaded from EThOS by post-graduates, researchers, and teachers from Finland, Brazil, the US, the UK, and Australia.

Following a request made via EThOS by a post-graduate student from Australia, we uploaded Dr Neller’s thesis to our institutional repository last week. Since the upload, ‘The Gospel of Thomas and the earliest texts of the synoptic gospels’ has been downloaded 12 times in only a week – these are truly phenomenal statistics, more than 1 download per day.
We hope that Dr Neller’s thesis will inspire its readers, encourage further research, and that its popularity will motivate other researchers to make their theses publicly available as well. 

Our thanks go to Mrs Neller for kindly allowing us to upload the full text into our repository.


Maja Gusavac 
(Guest blogger)

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