Open access ETD boasts more than 100,000 submissions and nearly 85 million downloads from 234 countries.
OhioLINK’s Electronic Theses and Dissertation (ETD) Center, which showcases the research output from Ohio’s institutions as researchers commence their careers, has surpassed 100,000 submissions and more than 85 million downloads from 234 countries. This cutting-edge research is delivered via open access—meaning the theses and dissertations are made available to a global audience, at no cost. Theses and dissertations are submitted electronically by masters and Ph.D.s from OhioLINK’s member institutions of higher education in the state of Ohio for inclusion. The OhioLINK ETD Center provides the largest open access collection of theses and dissertations in the world, according to Google Scholar.
“In the last year alone, the ETD Center has had nine million downloads globally,” OhioLINK Executive Director Gwen Evans said. “This level of interest is a strong indication that people are looking to Ohio for cutting-edge research, and it’s evidence of the excellence of Ohio graduate programs. The ETD Center is a primary component of our long-term commitment to open access, in making materials available worldwide which were formerly locked behind commercial vendors’ paywalls.”
“What an impressive milestone for OhioLINK and the Ohio ETD community—to not only reaffirm their international leadership in the current ETD field, but also providing open access for the sharing of this collection with the world,” said Tim Watson, director of graduation services at The Ohio State University.
Launched in 2001, the ETD Center was built as a single website for the work of Ohio’s scholars. That unique approach allowed for a broad platform for all participating institutions, providing simple streamlined searching across all the institutions for ETDs. Since 2001 the ETD Center has expanded its features, capabilities, and interoperability including becoming a valued submission and review tool, public front-facing website, received inclusion in Google Scholar, and the option for submitters to add their ORCID identifiers.
“OhioLINK has held a nearly 20-year commitment to providing information at no cost to anyone with an internet connection. It’s exciting to see how far it’s come,” Evans said.
Theses and dissertations are submitted and made available via open access at no cost to the authors. The 100,000th ETD in the OhioLINK ETD Center is Patient-specific prospective respiratory motion correction in cardiovascular MRI by Michael Bush, a PhD in Biomedical Engineering at The Ohio State University.
The addition of the batch retrospective upload feature in 2016 helped reach this milestone of 100,000 ETDs even sooner than expected, as The Ohio State University added digitized dissertations back to the early 1900s. For more information on the retrospective upload feature, see this previous post: https://www.ohiolink.edu/press/ohiolink_etd_center_adds_retrospective_batch_upload.
