Electronic Dissertations and Theses (long)
ELECTRONIC THESES AND DISSERTATIONS The following material presents a conundrum for perusal and comment by all of those concerned about the future of Electronic Publishing and its relevance to Chemistry. It deals with the electronic publishing of theses and dissertations. This Forum started when Ray Dessy of Virginia Tech E-mailed me for advice, asking several questions related to this matter. The subject has so many ramifications that I asked him to provide a fuller background to nucleate the Forum. That background, and his original questions appear below. I apologize for the unusual length, but it seemed better to consolidate the comments than to send them out separately. In particular, I would wish to highlight the fact that Chemists will need to be pro-active in promoting their interests, rather than accepting possibly inappropriate standards derived from non-chemical areas. Henry Rzepa h.rzepa@ic.ac.uk -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----
"The Future is a Foreign Country; They Do Things Differently There"; but it is not immediately obvious how to handle the interlocking, conflicting goals that are occurring there. This discussion starts with (1) published guidelines for the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Project (ETD) at Virginia Tech initiated on 1 January of 1997. The ETD Project is championed by Professor Ed Fox, Computer Science Department, fox@vt.edu . Some 20 other Universities may use the ETD site as a repository in this nascent consortium. The ETD requirements are followed by opinions from (2) a journal editor, and (3, 4) two faculty. The conflict between the various goals of these parties led to a compromise for submission which involves potential escrowing of material, and the preliminary form of that option is included (5). Also appended (6) is a recent Press Announcement by University Microfilms International (UMI), which has announced its own electronic distribution program. Finally, the original dialogue between Dessy and Rzepa (7) poses some interesting questions to Forum participants. Ray Dessy Chemistry Department Virginia Tech rdessy@chemserver.chem.vt.edu
********************************************************************* THE UNIVERSITY VIEW
THE FOLLOWING ARE EXCERPTS FROM THE ETD GUIDELINES AT VIRGINIA TECH
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Preparing an Electronic Thesis or Dissertation (ETD) involves only three steps:
(1) Prepare your thesis or dissertation in any word processor. (2) Use the Adobe PDFWriter printer driver or Adobe Acrobat Distiller software to generate a PDF file. (3) Use Adobe Acrobat Exchange to view the document, add bookmarks, and link external multimedia objects.
THEN SIGN THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT:
COPYRIGHT STATEMENT I hereby grant to Virginia Tech or its agents the right to archive and display my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University Libraries in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. ___________________ name, date
Here is the current list of file formats we accept thus far.
Thesis Body PDF DVI ETD-ML
Text ASCII (.txt) SGML -- Note: We recommend Unicode for non-Roman characters.
Images PDF (.pdf) -- use Type I PostScript fonts JPEG (.jpg) CompuServe GIF (.gif) TIFF following version 6.0 or later, including CCITT G4 (.tif) CGM Computer Graphics Metafile (.cgm) PhotoCD -- Note: We recommend a minimum of 600 dpi resolution for images of pages with text.
Video MPEG (i.e., MPEG-1, MPEG-2) (.mpg) QuickTime - Apple (.mov) Audio Video Interleaved - Microsoft (.avi)
Audio MPEG-2 CD-DA CD-ROM/XA (A or B or C) AIF (.aif) SND (.snd) WAV (.wav) MIDI (with timing information) (.midi)
Authoring Authorware Director (MMM, PICS)
Special Spreadsheet - Excel (.xcl) AutoCAD (.dxf)
Referring "handles" as URNs (URLs don't last very long), ISBN, ISSN
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A JOURNAL EDITOR'S VIEW (E-mail to Prof. Fox, February 1997)
(An) "important issue from the point of view of journal editors .. has been the question of prior publication of work and how that affects our willingness to accept papers. The JACS guidelines, and I believe those of most of the other ACS journals, are clear on this point. Our guide to authors can be accessed on the WWW at:
http://pubs.acs.org/journals/jacsat/index.html
As stated in the Notice to Authors of Papers, submission of a manuscript to the Journal implies that the work reported therein has not received prior publication and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere in any medium, including electronic journals and computer data bases of a public nature. The editors and the advisory board have established a policy that any material that is posted in electronic conferences or on WWW pages or in news-groups will be considered as published in that form, in the same way as if that work had been submitted or published in a print medium.
Thus the publication of work in a dissertation on the WWW before it has gone through peer review and is published in our journal would be considered as prior publication of that work and hence not publishable in the journal." Allen Bard Editor Professor of Chemistry J. Am. Chem. Soc. Univ. of Texas, Austin
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A DEPARTMENT HEAD'S VIEW (quoted from meeting statement, February 1997)
"The academic chemical research enterprise differs from many in the University. The ideas behind the work originate completely with the Chair of the Dissertation Committee. Usually the work is funded by an outside source who reviewed a proposal from the (mentor). Because of the complexity of many proposals a student's dissertation will only be a fragment of the study, and not a complete solution. More work, perhaps another dissertation or two, is needed to complete a project. A premature release of information would seriously compromise the success of the project by preventing peer-reviewed publication and, in the case of patentable work, providing competitors with preliminary results. ....dissertations from the Department of Chemistry should not be placed on the Web without the approval of the Chair of the Dissertation Committee." Rich Gandour Professor and Head Department of Chemistry Virginia Tech gandour@vt.edu
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A RESEARCHER'S VIEW (quoted from E-mail to Chemistry Faculty, February 1997)
"I think the premature disclosure issue is a major one. The vast majority of student theses ... contain preliminary observations that form the keys to future student projects, future grant proposals, future papers, and future patents. Recognizing these observations ... and acting upon them generally takes a long time. A new student picking up a project takes a year to train. It takes 9-12 months from the date of submission of a grant proposal in which the observations are reported to the receipt of funds (if you get funded the first time around). Having people being able to take advantage of your work by simply surfing the net with a few key-words means we are cutting our own throats if we put any unpublished data in our student's electronic theses." Peter Kennelly Assoc. Prof. Biochemistry Department Virginia Tech pjkennel@vt.edu
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AN ESCROWED COMPROMISE (draft submitted to Chemistry Department, February 1997)
DOCUMENT STATUS (to be completed by Chair of Dissertation Committee)
1.___ Release entire work immediately world wide.
2.___ Release entire work for Virginia Tech access only and release world wide after 12 months.
3.___ Hold entire work for one year for patent or proprietary purposes.
4.___ Hold chapter ___ ___ Not to be released at all, or ___ only release for Virginia Tech access, or ___ until notified by __________ re publication in _______
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DISSERTATIONS GOING ELECTRONIC AT UMI (Press Release, February 1997)
Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations to Be Published and Available in Digital Format
ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN - UMI, a Bell & Howell company (NYSE: BHW), today announced the development of a unique digital library of Doctoral dissertations and Masters theses that will be accessible by the second quarter of this year.
The new digital library, known as ProQuest Digital Dissertations, will be created from electronically submitted material as well as from UMI's conversion of traditional paper-based dissertations into digital format. ProQuest Digital Dissertations will be accessible initially on the World Wide Web (http://wwwlib.umi.com/) and in the future through UMI's online information system, ProQuest Direct.
UMI is the world's foremost publisher of doctoral dissertations, annually publishing more than 90 percent of all dissertations submitted from accredited institutions of higher learning in North America as well as from many colleges and universities in Europe and Asia. UMI's dissertation database, amassed over the past 60 years, totals nearly 1.4 million titles, beginning with the first U.S. dissertation accepted by a university (Yale) in 1861.
A New Tool for Colleges and Universities
Bonnie Lawlor, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Academic, Public and Government Library Division, said, "The digital revolution and the rapid rise of electronic publishing have changed the needs of virtually everyone in academia. Today's students are computer literate and technology facilitates innovation in the presentation of their research results. UMI wants to encourage innovation and ProQuest Digital Dissertations will give colleges and universities a new tool they and their students can use as digital publishing becomes increasingly commonplace."
"An Indispensable Asset"
Noting that many colleges and universities are still formulating policies and procedures for electronic publishing of dissertations and theses, Lawlor said, "UMI's guidelines for the submission of electronic material for inclusion in ProQuest Digital Dissertations will help these institutions in their endeavors and will be an indispensable asset, not only for colleges and universities, but for authors and researchers as well."
Other Benefits
Lawlor said ProQuest Digital Dissertations will also offer colleges and universities a stable publishing environment where costs and procedures are known well in advance. "Digital Dissertations will enable colleges and universities to gradually migrate toward electronic publishing as their budgets allow," she said. "It will also provide a level playing field for all institutions, regardless of their electronic publishing capabilities."
No Pre-conditions for Electronic Access
"There is no requirement," she emphasized, "that dissertations or masters theses be submitted electronically in order to be accessed electronically."
UMI will continue accepting print copies of theses and dissertations and will begin converting these to Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) starting with 1997 titles. A permanent microfilm archive will continue to support the new digital library.
Institutions can submit theses and dissertations from students electronically via floppy disk, CD-ROM or a networked server. Instructions and guidelines for submitting documents electronically are provided in detail at http://wwwlib.umi.com/solutions/.
Other Value-Added Services
Institutions submitting theses and dissertations to UMI will receive free Web access to all documents they submit for publication. In addition, UMI will provide free Web access to the most current three months of citations and abstracts to all dissertations and theses listed in the dissertations abstracts database.
Web Links
UMI will also provide participating institutions with an Internet address, or Uniform Resource Locator (URL) which instructors and students can use to point to a listing of an institution's current dissertations and theses that have been published by UMI.
Colleges and universities may use these URLs to promote recently completed research by their students. The citations with abstracts will be available for the most recent 12 month period and will be updated monthly. If an instructor, student or researcher wants to order the full text of a dissertation or thesis, the ability to order online will be available through Dissertation Express.
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SOME QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Date sent: Sat, 22 Feb 1996 09:13:12 +0000 To: "RAY DESSY" <rdessy@chemserver.chem.vt.edu> From: "Rzepa, Henry" <h.rzepa@ic.ac.uk> Subject: Re: ELECTRONIC THESES AND DISSERTATION PROJECTS
Henry, many of our organic folk are concerned about the currentness, and future scalability of the products, as well as the technical, legal and ethical matters involved.
They are correct to be very very concerned
(1) How soon will we see older material becoming difficult to read based on these formats?
Normally done as image maps. Take Elsevier. They have a history of "camera ready" ms. Now they are having to scan these, and insert PDF bitmaps, which are completely un-indexable, and achieve NO IMPROVEMENT over the paper original!
(2) How well are MicroSoft and other vendors tracking things like you and the OMF, for example, are creating?
They want to impose their own solutions.
(3) What do you think about PDF format?
Temporary
(4) How would you have suggested handling static and dynamic molecular imaging?
The MIME project showed the way, CORBAChem, CML etc are the way forward.
(5) Would you have chosen other standards for Chemistry?
Yes (eg CML)
Any opinions on the escrow solution would be deeply appreciated.
Steve Heller has suggested that Universities should be the publishers of the future. The actions of Virginia Tech and UMI seem to suggest that we are seeing the first skirmishes in the struggle. cf. http://www.elsevier.nl:80/inca/homepage/saa/trac/heller3.htm
Dear Ray,
Your questions are quite the most profound and important ones I have seen in a very long time.
My initial reaction is that this sort of thing demands a great level of consultation. We have thought deeply about how to do it for chemistry in regard to electronic journals, and my overall feeling must be that its non-trivial, must be handled by experts and chemists, and is not ready for graduate use yet, or probably in the next 2-3 years.
The basic issue is whether to track "page fidelity" so that the documents produced are legally as watertight as they can be, or whether to track "content fidelity" so that the documents can be re-used by any chemist reading them with no risk of error introduction or ambiguity. To my mind, the two approaches are still divergent; PDF representing one, SGML the other. Our approach is to create the content in SGML, and to convert as necessary to either PDF, or HTML etc as required. Put simply, the existing "scientific publishing" SGML DTD (12083) is far from satisfactory from the point of view of content, and it will be several years before this problem is properly solved.
I have just finished editing the ECHET96 conference, and as it turns out, that is an excellent example of the problems facing a dissertation writer. We sweated blood to extract "live" chemistry from the 4000 or so organic structure diagrams contained therein. Optical image recognition on the bit-map images was a failure; we encoded them by hand. Why did we bother? To allow people to access the "live" chemical content. A "dead" PDF file would probably have served as a historical document, but would not have created a tool for use by subsequent chemists.
This is a not trivial problem; the majority of chemical publishers acknowledge that their experiments with PDF are interim solutions, driven by market pressures. In any case, almost all of them are retaining the SGML databases, so that they can dig themselves out of the PDF hole if need be.
I have to ask why the graduate school want electronic copy? If its for "page fidelity", then paper does a pretty good job! If its to enfranchise and enable the content for future generations, then for chemists, chemical solutions must be adopted, not generic ones. Perhaps its to enable indexing? But chemistry is notoriously difficult to index unless the molecular content is retained. For example, take a look at http://www.venus.co.uk/omf/cml/ as a mechanism for say writing a chemical dissertation. That would achieve what we want, but its a little way away from being the sort of environment which you could give to a grad student and let them get on with it.
I could write much more. Perhaps I should by expressing my feeling is that if chemists accept the imposition of "page fidelity" driven standards, then we will be going down what could turn out to be an expensive cul-de-sac to reverse out of. If its done, it MUST be done in a way that benefits chemists, and not some faceless mandarin with a lawyer by their side.
******************************************************************** INPUT TO THESE VARIOUS MATTERS ARE WELCOMED FROM FORUM PARTICIPANTS Ray Dessy Chemistry Department 0212 540-231-5842 Virginia Tech fax 540-231-3255 Blacksburg, VA 24061 rdessy@chemserver.chem.vt.edu
Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY; rzepa@ic.ac.uk; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804. URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)
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Rzepa, Henry