2015 Ethos survey launched: chance to win a Kindle

The British Library Ethos service has just launched a new user survey. Just go to the website http://ethos.bl.uk and the survey should pop up automatically. Ethos are offering respondents the chance to win a Kindle.

Ethos is a national thesis service that is designed to maximise the usability and visibility of UK doctoral theses.

"EThOS aims to provide:

• A national aggregated record of all doctoral theses awarded by UK Higher Education institutions
• Free access to the full text of as many theses as possible for use by all researchers to further their own research." Ethos http://ethos.bl.uk/About.do

Back in 2013 Ethos ran a similar survey, which can be found here. Some highlights for the previous survey were:

• 40% of Ethos users are postgraduates.
• 87% of users reported that Ethos materials had helped them in their research.
• The majority of Ethos users are undertaking academic research, and 80% of the respondents said they are from Higher Education.

Ethos are running the survey again, with similar questions to last time in order to gauge trends, but there are also some new questions, including questions regarding authors' views on open access theses.

Open Access and content mining

We've previously blogged about the British Library Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) that stores theses metadata and, where possible, the full text of digitised theses. BL Labs now wants to explore EThOS metadata for content mining or analysis of trends and is currently inviting research questions that could be answered using this approach. The move follows on from its project providing data to Virginia Tech to develop algorithms for automated subject tagging of theses.

This is another example of an overlay project underpinned by large-scale data harvesting such as the successful Mechanical Curator project that released one million out of copyright images into the public domain for researcher use and re-use.

ChemSpider is an earlier project that brings together chemical structures from a variety of sources into a free database including data from St Andrews theses. This publishing platform provides opportunities to make good quality data public, re-use and preserve known compound data and related information to advance research, develop services and surface the data on the wider internet.

It's an exciting area of Open Access and Open data and there are likely to be further developments as efforts are made digitising older theses and other sources.

Image captured by the Mechanical Curator project.  No known copyright restrictions.

British Library EThOS coverage expanded

Digitising theses and making them available free of charge over the internet has been one of the great successes of Open Access that is often forgotten.  The British Library Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) recently announced a significant expansion of coverage, which is great news for researchers:

Image: © The British Library Board

Cambridge - 8000 new theses records added resulting in a coverage of recent theses increase from 7% to 78%

Imperial College - 2000 new records

King's College London - 1000 new links to the KCL Research Repository added to records; a further 500 new records created

Nottingham Trent and Coventry - Records now being harvested following set-up issues

University College London - New "all PhDs" Open Archives Initiative (OAI) set created allowing linking to an additional 1600 records in UCL Discovery.

Repositories added - School of Advanced Study, University of Gloucestershire, Edge Hill University and University of Brighton records are now being harvested

The EThOS advanced search function allows limiting to full text items available for immediate download. This search currently returns 1755 items for University of St Andrews.  Where no full text is available it is possible to request digitisation on demand or, if digitisation is not permitted, to source a physical copy through the traditional inter-library loan service.

Please visit our web pages if you need help and support finding St Andrews theses.

Access to Understanding 2015 science writing competition

The Access to Understanding 2015 science writing competition has been announced. Now in its third year, the aim of the competition is to promote public understanding of complex research in Biomedical Science. If you are a PhD student or early career postdoctoral researcher working in this field who believes in creating and using accessible research, then choose one of the papers on which to write 800 words to explain the research and why it matters to a general reader. You could be in with a chance to win a first prize of publication of your article by eLIFE (and an iPad too!).


Closing date: 9 December 2014 16:00 GMT

This competition is sponsored by the British Library, eLIFE and Europe PMC*.
Use the links to see the results of previous competitions.

Image: © Access to Understanding collaboration

*Europe PubMed Central is a stable, permanent and free-to-access digital archive of the full text, peer-reviewed research publications (and datasets) that arise from research funded by the MRC, Wellcome Trust and other members of the Europe PMC Funders Group. (Source: Medical Research Council)

If you are a St Andrews researcher and need help with Europe PMC deposit as part of funder requirements, please contact the Open Access and Research Publications Support (OARPS) team open-access-support@st-andrews.ac.uk.