ETDs and Digital Repositories--a Disciplinary Challenge to Open Access?

Abstract

The University of Maryland Libraries have managed a repository using D-Space software for over two years, providing faculty a service for posting their research work and a foundation for moving the labor intensive management of paper dissertations and theses to the digital environment. Close cooperation with the Graduate School has been an essential feature of moving to a uniform requirement that theses and dissertations be presented in PDF format and posted in the Digital Repository at University of Maryland (DRUM). At an early stage, intellectual property issues began to emerge as an important policy dimension of managing DRUM—as they have for virtually any institution that gets into the digital repository business.