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India starts consultation on making thesis online

The University Grants Commission (UGC) of India is inviting public comments to its draft consultation paper �Electronic Thesis Online (India) UGC (Submission of Metadata and Full-text of Doctoral Theses in Electronic Format) Regulations, 2005�.

The paper reviews the recent developments in the field of electronic thesis, current scenario in online thesis archiving in India and abroad and implementation mechanisms while recommending a set of metadata for online archiving of electronic theses and dissertations (ETD).

The consultation paper also incorporates UGC�s Submission of Metadata and Full-text of Doctoral Theses in Electronic Format Regulations, 2005.

UGC�s plan of implementing a regulatory framework and an implementation mechanism for maintaining standards, archiving, accessing doctoral research from the Indian universities will ensure easy archive and access of Indian Doctoral theses, besides raising the standard of research.

ETDs help research degree awarding institutions overcome serious problem of duplication of research and poor quality resulting from the 'poor visibility' and the 'unseen' factor in research output.

UGC is inviting comments from the stakeholders on the Draft Regulations & Implementation Process with Annexure(s).

Comments can be sent by email at pagarwal@ugc.ac.in by 15th June, 2005.

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User comments

"Advantages of open access archiving"

Author: Subbiah Arunachalam

Time: 31.05.2005 15:28

Comment: While it is good to have full texts of all PhD theses available online from a UGC-supported repository, it would be even better if UGC supports (and ensures) that every university has its own interoperable institutional open access archive for research papers. All the maor universities in The Netherlands, for example, have such archives. In India, the Indian Institute of Science has its own archive. Currently, there are more than 400 institutional archives around the world, but less than ten in India. The advantages of such institutional archives are indeed great. Not only will they make Indian research work more visible, but also they will help Indian research papers win more citations. Please see Peter Suber's blog "Open Access News" for detailed information.
UGC may have a policy by which only papers made available through open access archives are considered for promotions, appointments, tenure, funds for research proposals, etc. in Indian higher educational and research institutions.
Such archives are easy to set up. The software is absolutely free. The technical skills needed are available within the country. All we need is the will to do it!

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