[etd] ETDs for sale on Amazon, BookDepository

[Brian E Minihan]

Hello colleagues,

My colleagues across town at Hong Kong University are having an issue with what appears to be a mass-harvesting of ETD metadata from their IR and resale of the text on platforms such as Amazon, and Book Depository (UK)---a clear violation of the CC BY NC terms of use.

However, HKU appears to be struggling with the vendors to have the seller, Open Dissertation Press, remove them.

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/03/16/40000-hong-kong-university-theses-sold-online-without-authorisation/

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/2079185/university-hong-kong-take-action-against-unauthorised-sale

Has any other institution come across anything similar to this scenario?

 

Many thanks,

 

Brian Minihan

Scholarly Communications Librarian

Digital & Multimedia Services

Hong Kong Baptist University Library

(852) 3411 8037

min...@hkbu.edu.hk

[Shari Hill Sweet]

Brian,

I'm not aware of this issue affecting Notre Dame dissertations and theses (yet), but thank you for bringing it to our attention. We'll definitely be watching more closely.

Thank you,

Shari Hill Sweet

Univ. of Notre Dame

[Thomas Dowling]

I have spent some time this weekend looking over rights statements in OATD.org. I am finding a number of universities whose OAI-PMH metadata publishes a rights statement with a Creative Commons Attribution (or CC-BY) license, when that license is not indicated, or is contradicted, in either the local repository's public web interface or in the ETDs' PDF full text.

In other words, it's relatively common to see full metadata with a dc.rights statement like "Attribution 4.0 International"; an item record in the local repository that either displays no rights information or (less often) displays a different CC license; and a PDF file that says nothing more about permissions than "Copyright J. Smith, 2017".

I am concerned that this lack of consistency can give bad actors a fig leaf for the kind of theft reported at HKU. I encourage repository managers to confirm that their metadata is consistent across interfaces, that it matches what they really want it to be, and that it represents what authors have really agreed to.

OATD.org now displays after any rights statement with a CC license, "Always confirm rights and permissions with the source record."

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Thomas Dowling

Director of Technologies, ZSR Library

Wake Forest University

dowl...@wfu.edu / 336-758-5797