The Impact of Mandatory Policies on ETD Acquisition

The Impact of Mandatory Policies on ETD Acquisition

This paper analyzes the data now available in Australia's coordinated Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) gateway to show the impact of high-level institutional policy decisions on population of the individual repositories. The paper shows that just like research article repositories, voluntary ETD deposition results in repositories collecting less than 12% of the available theses, whereas mandatory policies are well accepted and cause deposit rates to rise towards 100%. Modeling of the Ph.D. and Master process in Australia is also carried out to indicate the delays and liabilities to be expected if mandatory policies are applied only to newly enrolled candidates.

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