MSc Dissertation and copyright: Reality bites

Beth is making real progress with her dissertation and her outputs are looking really good.  There is the small matter of copyright however – Beth is quite happy for me to use her material/IPR but a lot of her data is from a questionnaire and in depth interviews with research staff who have given only verbal consent for their responses to be shared.  Rachel, the copyright clearance officer, suggested that we really need explicit written consent before I start posting interview transcripts (anonymous of course) to the blog.  Beth will go back to her subjects to get an autograph – in the meantime here is a spreadsheet of Beth’s that I can share – data on UK IRs

MSc Dissertation

I am excited by some of the material being generated by Masters student Beth Hall and we’d both like to thank all those staff and postgraduates (48 so far!) who have taken the time to complete her questionnaire (there’s still time if you haven’t yet got round to it!).

Beth is in the process of conducting follow-up interviews with those that have agreed.

I will post a couple of her early outputs to this blog:

Here is a graphical summary of some of the data gathered by the questionnaire [N=48]

Here are the questions that will comprise the face to face interviews.

I should emphasise that these are early outputs and very much represent work in progress; nevertheless there is some useful data that we can use as a foundation for ongoing advocacy and I look forward to reading Beth’s dissertation when it is written.

MSc Dissertation: questionnaire

As part of her MSc Information Studies course, Leeds Met student Beth Hall is undertaking a dissertation investigating disciplinary differences in opinion of and use of open access repositories by research-active academic staff and postgraduate students.

Beth’s work will also provide useful information for the development of the Leeds Met repository and we would be very grateful if you could spend a few minutes  completing her questionnaire (Leeds Met staff/postgrads only)