Netherlands
From European e-Theses
Update 22 February 2007 by Gerard van Westrienen (SURFfoundation)
1. Are electronic doctoral (PhD) theses being collected digitally and made accessible (publicly/open access) in the Netherlands?
Yes, they are.
SURF has initiated and coordinated a project called ‘Promise of Science’ (October 2005 – December 2006) with the aim:
- to set up a national (PhD) e-theses site as part of DAREnet
- to make available 10.000 e-thesis via this site by the end of 2006
- to ensure that by the end of 2006, more than 90% of all new thesis will be mounted on the local institutional repositories and made publicly available
see for further informatoin on this project: http://www.darenet.nl/en/page/page.view/promise_meerinfo.page
The result (March 2007) is that currently over 14,000 fully Open Access doctoral e-Theses are available via de Promise of Science portal in DAREnet: http://www.darenet.nl/promiseofscience [1] and that currently over 75% of all new e-Theses are available on this National e-Theses Portal. The percentage is still rising.
2. How many per year? What percentage of the total of e-theses?
See above. In total, around 2600 - 2800 theses per year are being published in the Netherlands. The total of e-theses differs strongly per university: from 40% to (almost) 100%.
3. Does anyone enrich (add value to) e-theses? For example by-
o identifying and resolving legal (eg copyright) or plagiarism issues
Not at this moment;
o preserving them
As soon as an e-theses is part of DAREnet, it will be incorporated into the preservation process for which we have formal arrangements with the e-depot of the Royal Library in the Netherlands (the KB)
o linking e-theses with related material on which they are based (including data, statistics, multimedia, etc)
Not yet; this will be part of the follow-up programme of DARE, the SURFshare programme, which runs from 2007-2010.
4. What kinds of interoperability are useful in your national context? For example:
o syntactic interoperability (eg, simple / advanced cross-search, use of OAI-PMH harvesting protocol)
Yes, it’s useful and used. In DAREnet, we have the option of cross search. DARE and DAREnet are using the OAI-PMH protocol
o semantic interoperability (eg, access via disciplines / subjects, multilingual access)
Could be useful in a national context, but even more in an international context.
5. Who ensures that the following issues are dealt with, so that e-theses are available?
o business models (financial sustainability - who pays?)
mainly the local institution; it’s part of the institutional policy. Since January 2007 DAREnet is hosted and maintained by the KNAW, the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences.
o organisational / roles and responsibilities (who does what?)
the library – as manager of the institutional repository – has an important role; but also other stakeholders are important.
o legal (copyright / licences, liability, etc)
In general the author is considered to be the copyright owner. If any legal problems occur when putting a thesis into the repository, in general the library will intervene. During the Promise of Science project some studies and reports were produced regarding copyright issues related to e-theses.
6. What European-level activities would be useful to add value to your national activities?
- exchange Good Practices, lessons learned
- on a local or national level, it is of interest to create “e-theses windows”. On an international level, as well as for researchers/scholars it is of much more interest to create disciplinary of topical “windows”
- enrich the ‘traditional’ publication (as pdf) with other related and relevant data and materials (primary data, multi media files, simulations etc) and therefore make better use of the extended possibilities and options of the digital era
- exchange ideas how to add value for authors and institutions (like: better availablity and visibility; more citations; higher impact etc.) and elaborate on (common/international) practices and projects to further improve this
7. Please could you say a little about the educational / university processes around the production of PhD theses, and graduation for doctoral students, in the Netherlands In the Netherlands a dissertation is seen as a proof that candidates are able to do their academic work independently. This proof is normally provided in four years, and has to be defended publicly. The major part of their work is reserved for doing original research. On average they devote around 10% of their time on teaching. They also receive education, mainly in the first year(s) of their term.
In general the candidate gets a temporary appointment at the university of 4 years. There are however also PhD students, who receive a grant. In practice only around 10% of the thesis are finished within 4 years.
Each year, around 2600 – 2800 theses are defended. The distribution of the PhD candidates is as follows (2004): Economics 5% Humanities and Social Sciences 12% Health and medicine 12% Agriculture 6% Natural Sciences 23% Law 4% Languages and cultural studies 8% Technical 29% Other 1%
