The 12th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), ETD 2009, will be held from June 10-13, 2009 at the University of Pittsburgh. The conference is organised by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations and cosponsored by Pitt's University Library System (ULS) and West Virginia University Libraries.
ETD 2009 will focus on the latest developments and projects related to digital repositories, e-learning, digital preservation, digital library standards and open access. International experts from 25 countries will also share their ideas of the future of electronic scholarly publishing. Among them is Stevan Harnad, a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal and the University of Southampton as well as the founder of the American Scientist Open Access Forum and a proponent of open access.
Pitt is among the earliest adopters of ETDs. Since its inception in 2000, the University's ETD programme has amassed more than 2,600 documents, most of which are freely accessible to scholars worldwide. Electronic submission is now mandatory for all Pitt programmes with a thesis requirement, and the collection now grows at the rate of approximately 500 per year. ETDs are seen to have dramatically increased the visibility of the university's latest research, increased usage tenfold compared to print circulation, and shaved months off the time it takes to make new research accessible.
Pitt recently established an open access repository called D-Scholarship@Pitt that includes ETDs as well as published and unpublished research papers, conference papers and presentations, research data, and such supporting multimedia as audio, video and images. Materials are submitted directly by the authors and must pertain to scholarly research.
