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.

Share My Thesis competition - update

Last week the British Library Ethos service announced the winner of the Share My Thesis competition. We posted about the competition back in January, see here for more information.
 
The entrants had to first tweet about why their research is/was important using the #ShareMyThesis hashtag. The 8 shortlisted entrants then had to write a short article to elaborate on their tweet. You can read the winning entries here: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.

Although the competition is now closed, the British Library Ethos service still encourages PhD students past and present to use #ShareMyThesis to share their PhD research with a wider audience.

EThOS #ShareMyThesis competition now open!

Copyright © The British Library Board

The British Library EThOS service has started a Share My Thesis competition (in collaboration with Vitae and Research Councils UK).

How to enter:
Entry for the competition is through twitter using #ShareMyThesis. Entrants must explain in a single tweet why their doctoral research is important.

The fine print:
Entrants must have either completed their PhD degree or be currently studying for a PhD. Equivalent degrees such as DPhil are also allowed. Entrants must only tweet once, and also ensure that their tweet is understandable to a lay audience.The full terms and conditions can be found here.

The next stage of the competition will see the authors of the best 8 tweets write a short article elaborating on what they wrote previously, explaining in more detail why their research is important. This article will be in the style of a blog post no more than 600 words long.

First prize is a 15" retina display MacBook Pro! Second prize is an iPad, and third is a £200 Amazon voucher.

The closing date for entering your tweets is 9th February 2015 at 10am.

A bit about EThOS: The British Library EThOS service aims to increase visibility to UK doctoral research theses by compiling records of all UK doctoral theses in one database. It also offers free access to the full text of as many theses as possible either by links to institutional repositories (such as our own) or directly through the EThOS database. EThOS also offers a digitisation on demand facility where users can request that a thesis be scanned and uploaded to the database. EThOS will then contact the corresponding institution and request that a copy be sent for digitisation. Many St Andrews theses have undergone this process, and we have found that many older theses have found a new lease of life afforded by the greater degree of visibility. The benefits of the EThOS service were perfectly presented in a previous blog post by a postgraduate work experience student Maja, so rather than repeat her words, I'll simply suggest you have a read of her post.

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.