Belgium

From European e-Theses

E-theses in Belgium

International workshop on electronic theses, 19-20 January 2006 in Amsterdam: Belgian situation

Responses by: UA, VUB, UHasselt, UGent, KUleuven (5 of the 6 Flemish universities) ULB, UCL (2 of the 9 universities of the French speaking community.)

1 Are electronic doctoral (PhD) theses being collected digitally and made accessible (publicly/open access) in Belgium?

Flemish community: 3 e-theses repositories (UGent 2004, UHasselt 2005, KUleuven 2005), 2 in preparation (VUB, UA).

In the Belgian French speaking Community, a project was run in 2002-2003 to install ETD servers in three universities (Brussels, Louvain-la-Neuve and Liège). This project intended to permit the deposit of e-dissertations in the whole Belgian French speaking Community.

2 How many per year? What percentage of the total of e-theses?

UGent: 37 deposits in 2004, 75 in 2005, in total 112. This is 15% of all the e-theses (doctoral and masters theses). The deposit is done on a voluntary basis.

UHasselt: Repository of e-theses just started. No e-theses are available yet. Deposit is mandatory

KUleuven: 171 deposits in 2005 of which 50% in open access. Deposit is mandatory, choice to put it in open access.

ULB: 181 dissertations are available (12/13/2005). Since 01/01/2004, the registration of a description and the contents are mandatory. o 73 theses where defended in 2005 (until now - 40%) o 75 theses where defended in 2004 (41%) o 33 theses were collected in the framework of retrospective initiatives (1995-2003 19%)

UCL: 93 in 2005 (on a total of 207 written theses). The deposit is done on a voluntary basis.

3 Does anyone enrich (add value to) e-theses? For example by-

- identifying and resolving legal (eg copyright) or plagiarism issues

In some cases copyright is checked by the library, in other cases the library only provides information and the author adds a document that states the copyright status

- preserving them

The dissertations are collected in a repository, preserved by the library

- linking e-theses with related material on which they are based (including data, statistics, multimedia, etc)

Only in KUleuven datasets can be archived with the doctoral thesis but these datasets are not open access.

4 What kinds of interoperability are useful in your national context? For example-

- syntactic interoperability (eg, simple / advanced cross-search, use of OAI-PMH harvesting protocol)

OAI-PMH can be important in making a sort of national scientific open archive

- semantic interoperability (eg, access via disciplines / subjects, multilingual access)

Links are provided with the catalogues of the libraries. In some cases, classification is added.

5 Who ensures that the following issues are dealt with, so that e-theses are available?

- business models (financial sustainability - who pays?)

UA: library ULB: university authorities + library project manager UCL: University library and IT budgets UGent: library and research department KUleuven: the university

- organisational / roles and responsibilities (who does what?)

UA: faculty administration, library and ICT department ULB: library project manager UCL: Library UGent: faculty administration and university library KUleuven: library and research department

- legal (copyright / licences, liability, etc)

UA: library to some extent (can I publish the dissertation on line?) ULB: university research administration + library project manager UCL: university research administration Ugent: library KUleuven: author but can rely on information from the library

6 What European-level activities would be useful to add value to your national activities?

UA: OAI Harvesting per discipline ULB: A European common catalogue + disciplinary common initiatives (see for example Economists Online http://www.nereus4economics.info/scholarunlock.html) UCL: EU-wide portal ; best practice models ; extended Romeo database (for national publishers) UGent: EU-portal KUleuven: aggregation on a European level

7 Please could you say a little about the educational / university processes around the production of PhD theses, and graduation for doctoral students, in Belgium

There is something that is called ‘doctoraatsopleiding”, where PHD students are kind of trained to do research, to bring papers for conferences, to write, to annotate etc. It is not mandatory in most universities or faculties and each faculty has its own program which means a lot of (quality) differences ….