Thesis

Toward shared system knowledge : an empirical study of knowledge sharing policy and practice in systems engineering research in the UK

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Awarding institution
  • University of Strathclyde
Date of award
  • 2012
Thesis identifier
  • T13094
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Department, School or Faculty
Abstract
  • Research in Open Access (OA) to Scholarly Publications has flourished in recent years, however studies published to date tend to be quantitative, statistical analyses over undifferentiated corpuses, that monitor the overall uptake (Björk et al. 2010; Laakso et al. 2011). This doctoral thesis explores a different path of inquiry: it examines the effectiveness of OA policies in relation to the perspective of a 'knowledge seeker' and considers them in the context of the wider regulatory landscape that motivates their existence, specifically monitoring the availability of shared resources - journal publications, as well as other knowledge sharing artefacts adopted in technical domains - in relation to systems engineering research in the UK. Research Funding Councils adopt Open Access policies and display them prominently on their website, yet not all funded research projects seem to share knowledge by publishing Open Access resources. The main hypothesis driving this thesis is that a gap exists between Open Access in theory and Open Access in practice. A unique research methodology is devised that combines evidence based research (EBR) with a wide range of mixed method techniques, including FOI (freedom of information) requests. A novel collection instrument, a set of heuristic indicators, are developed to support the empirical observation of the gap between 'Open Access policies in theory', corresponding approximately to what the funding body state on their website, and 'Open Access policies in practice', corresponding to the level of adoption of these policies by grant holders. A systematic review and a meta-analysis of a 100 publicly-funded projects are carried out. The research demonstrates empirically that in the majority of the audited publicly-funded projects, no Open Access resources can be located.
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Note
  • This thesis was previously held under moratorium from 24th July 2012 until 24th July 2014.
DOI
Date Created
  • 2012
Former identifier
  • 943734

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