Norway

From European e-Theses

Electronic doctoral Thesis: The situation in Norway at the start of 2006

Norway has 6 universities and 25 university colleges (4 universities and 27 university colleges before 01.01.2005). Of these, only 13 institutions produce doctorate degrees.

- Are electronic doctoral (PhD) theses being collected digitally and made accessible (publicly/open access) in Norway? See the Excel-file for the figures. Nonetheless, at UiB, all the PhDs are collected electronically and stored in a closed IR (very restricted access). At the 3 others main universities (NTNU, UiTø, UiO), all the PhDs are published in series.

- How many per year? What percentage of the total of e-theses? See the excel-file

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

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

      o preserving them

at UiB, all the PhDs are collected electronically and stored in a closed IR. At the same time, the National Library downloads periodically the .no-domain.

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

It seems that the different universities have a different way of doing this, for example, including journal articles (that are part of a thesis) in their IR.

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

There is an Electronic Publishing Group in Norway composed of library staff from the 4 main universities, some university colleges and the National Library. The group has applied and got funds to work on NORA (Norwegian Open Research Archive). NORA is an OAI-compliant harvester. NORA harvests the Norwegian IRs, and only them. In addition, the Electronic Publishing Group agrees on using the same metadata model and the same controlled vocabulary list. The National Library provides a URN-service.

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

     o business models (financial sustainability - who pays?)

The libraries are paying for the maintenance, the administration and the development of the IRs.

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

at UiB, the administrative management is responsible of the IR while the library is responsible for running it.

     o legal (copyright / licences, liability, etc)

At UiB, we check the copyright for articles that are to be included in the e-theses. We ask for permission to publish in IR on behalf of the author (when possible) NTNU has a written agreement with several publishers that secure them the right to make available electronic versions (publisher’s pdf) of articles when part of a thesis.

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

- Please could you say a little about the educational / university processes around the production of PhD theses, and graduation for doctoral students, in Norway In order to take a PhD, a student has to be both accepted and have a financial support. The student has to have completed a master degree. A PhD student is considered and paid as an employee. Completing a PhD-program takes 3 years if there is no obligation of teaching. The cost of production of the thesis (paper form) is supported by the institution. 2 exemplars of the paper thesis are available at the library at least 15 days before the defence. The defence is often considered as a formality.

- Any other information that you'd like to provide As you can see it in the Excel-file, some of the institutions have chosen to start and concentrate on electronic publishing of masters theses. The PhDs (along with other types of literature) must comply with the legal deposit situation in Norway. 7 copies of each paper thesis are delivered to the National Library of Norway. Of these 7 copies, one is sent to each of the 4 main universities; 3 remain at the National Library (one for conservation, one for inter-library loan and one for the reading room in Oslo).

The 4 main universities have Institutional Repositories: - MUNIN, University of Tromsø : DSpace - DUO, University of Oslo: has produced it’s own software http://duo.uio.no - Dr.avh. fra NTNU: uses DiVA http://www.diva-portal.org/ntnu/theses/ - BORA, University of Bergen: DSpace http://bora.uib.no

Gaëlle Bozec, 11.01.2006