Accessibility of master’s theses at SEA-EU Alliance universities in open access repositories | International Journal on Digital Libraries

Abstract:  This research analyzed and compared master’s theses deposits in institutional repositories of the SEA-EU Alliance universities in order to determine whether universities’ mandates to deposit master’s theses influence the number of theses deposited to the institutional repositories. We compared the universities’ institutional repository content focusing on the ratio of the number of deposited master’s theses to the number of enrolled students taking into account the open access policies, or more specifically, the national and the universities’ mandates to deposit master’s theses. The research methods involved a quantitative approach where the data were collected through direct communication with universities’ employees and from the institutional repositories in our sample. Our analysis showed that the number of papers stored in repositories reflects the open access policy, or more specifically, the master’s theses deposit policy, at certain universities. Furthermore, when analyzing the distribution of the number of theses across the scientific disciplines as well as the degree of openness it was evident that it largely concurred with the trends recorded in the current scholarly literature.