University of Waterloo electronic theses: issues and partnerships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss issues associated with open access (OA) to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) and to describe the University of Waterloo E‐thesis Project and its partnerships with Theses Canada and the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. Design/methodology/approach UW E‐thesis Project decisions on issues associated with electronic submission and OA are presented. Partnerships with Theses Canada and the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations are described and the goals and activities of these organizations are outlined. Findings Author‐created metadata form the UW E‐theses searchable database of records that link to theses in full text. The metadata are OAI compliant and are harvested by Theses Canada and the ETD Union Catalog. The E‐theses Project supports authors' rights while minimizing access restrictions and encourages innovations while respecting the value of gradually evolving thesis standards and traditions. The success of the UW E‐thesis Project illustrates that progress can be made toward the OA paradigm for theses and dissertations while upholding perennial values. Collaborations with like‐minded organizations support and advance these goals. Originality/value Academic librarians and graduate studies officers will find this e‐thesis project description and this discussion of issues relevant to planning and maintaining electronic thesis submission and access systems at their own universities. The descriptions of the benefits of the partnerships may prompt readers to make similar connections themselves.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.034 | 0.075 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.045 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.100 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".