 Okay, it is 255 right now since it's a short session. We'll go ahead and get started. So we make sure that our presenter Nicole white Simon Fraser University has sufficient time to talk Please make sure that you are muted and you have your sound and Video off during the session if you do have questions during the question-and-answer period and you feel like unmuting yourself Absolutely, please do Otherwise, please just enter any questions over the q&a section on the side and I will be happy to read those during q&a. All right, so thank you Nicole. Thanks Sally. You can hear me. Okay Okay, yes, sure Thank you And thank you for the opportunity to share a bit about the findings related to embargoes from our a survey I conducted Early this year on Canadian University ETD programs So I'll Sally mentioned I am Nicole white. I'm head of sfu library's research commons And that's a unit that supports faculty graduate students and postdoctoral fellows across the research writing and publication lifecycle The research commons is Also home to our institutions ETD program For those of you who may be unfamiliar with sfu it it's located about 30 minutes east of vancouver british columbia And we have branch campuses in both vancouver and in surrey sfu is on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the slay watuth squamish musqueam quick quitlam katesy and semi-amunations and i'm truly Grateful to live and work on these lands Um a little bit about sfu. We we do have Offer undergraduate degrees as well as masters and doctoral programs across eight faculties We have approximately 2500 masters students And about 1300 doctoral students Just to give you some background on the survey that I conducted The primary purpose of the survey was service improvement at our own institution We wanted to look at our own ETD program to make improvements and then of course share the results more broadly with the ETD community We looked or this survey looked as specifically the scope was canadian university ETD programs Using survey monkey. I used through january through march of 2021. I ran the survey The invitation was sent to 52 institutions and I received 36 responses And the institutional participants were selected from among those appearing in the university's canada online database There were 75 universities. I identified as having at least one masters or doctoral program And then from that I was able to Be in touch with 52 institutions So then my focus today is on on embargoes the survey also touched upon other areas of ETD programs like policy staffing workflows Emerging formats as well as services like consultation and instruction With every survey comes with some limitations. I just thought I'd make a quick note about those The study was really Intentionally broad it covered a wide range of program and policy and service areas I didn't seek to interrogate particular areas in great depth or be exhaust exhaustive in one area It was really done to look at areas That were of interest in our own ETD context. So it it did mean that the survey was somewhat unbalanced in that way I didn't want there were no required fields in the survey. So I didn't want to place undue barriers on those responding to questions What I found was that jurisdiction and responsibility for the ETD programs and you likely will know in your own role in your own institution that Responsibility and jurisdiction over many aspects of ETD programs are spread across often across library units or departments across faculties or schools So as a result the survey participants were in some cases understandably unfamiliar with the decision making or workflows or policies at their institution So during the analysis stage, I sometimes found that information provided by the survey participants Contradicted the information that was available on the institution's webpages so Where possible I tried to supplement that information from webpages last and associated with the first bullet survey the survey that I conducted was also extensive and It required a fairly long time commitment of participants. So unfortunately the survey responses to all questions Sometimes was spotty So with those limitations out of the way What what were the findings so very basically? um I did ask survey participants to indicate whether there was an embargo policy and I found at Canadian institutions These are widespread So just over about 80 or 26 out of the 32 respondents indicated that they have a university policy specific to thesis embargoes For those institutions that see 500 or more theses deposited annually at their institution that increases to 89 percent And actually to 100 percent if you consider the university websites the authoritative source of the information For anyone who's joining us from canada 22 out of the 23 canadian association of research library member Participants responded that they have an embargo policy at their Institution and the one remaining institution that didn't have a university policy covering embargoes Made available a form within the school of graduate studies That was in place to request a thesis not be published in the library's institutional repository for a year So not surprisingly embargo policies were less common at institutions where submission numbers were lower For institutions that accept between one and 500 annual submissions 43 percent or six of the 14 participants indicated that no embargo policy existed In light of the adoption of open access policies and education and advocacy for open scholarship since the early 2000s One might think that the theses Deposit requirements and the associated embargo policies might live within an institution's open access policy And I found this was very uncommon actually in almost all cases embargo policies are found within the graduate school policies or regulations And I suspect this is likely due to the fact that institutional policies have been developed after etd programs were established And already made the requirement for deposit explicit in its graduate general regulations or research policies And just one final note on that friend is in a small number of exceptions The reference to thesis embargoes is found within the University's research and publication policy for the university more broadly rather than within the graduate general regulations So in terms of policy language It often mirrors the language having kind of been involved with open access policies at our own institution And and seeing how open access policies have developed has been interesting to look at Embargo policy seems to be Kind of a mini version the language and structure that you'd find in a university's open access policy is kind of in mini Some begin with a mission or vision statement relating to the obligations graduate students have to making the research open They also recognize public funding or specifically in the canadian context the tri agency requirements for open access The tri agencies in canada being the three largest government funding bodies funding agencies So you can see some examples. I've left there on the slide I do find it Curious that there are few references to oa policies Typically in the graduate regulations Following the broader vision and mission statements embargo policies Identify that not all research of course can be made open There may be ethical or legal reasons to restricts access to a thesis necessary to protect the safety of individuals and groups That may be at risk as a result of openly available research On this front you can see policy language becomes frequently big And universities seem to to find all sorts of different synonyms to to Outline this so a good reason for delaying public access or compelling justifiable valid reasons or jeopardizing the students interests Ultimately what it comes down to most often is Interpretation of what is a good or compelling reason is left to the discretion typically of the dean of graduates the dean of the graduate school Or in and that's often with the support of a supervisor or committee So I I also looked at The nature Of the request for embargo So patent pending or patent application was the rationale across canadian institutions where embargoes were most frequently granted narrative responses to the survey indicated that two years was very very typical for patent pending or patent application There does seem to be varying levels of oversight for this embargo rationale with some institutions requiring evidence of the patent application prior to approving the embargo request Pending publication does remain among also unsurprisingly for many of you who are involved in this area It came up in the session earlier this week It pending publication is still approved by 82 percent of institutions or 23 of 28 respondents that they would approve Embargo's based on pending publication So whether this is coming from the students themselves or from advice given by supervisors or colleagues Fears that an open thesis will jeopardize future publication persists This is despite evidence that publishers will most often permit articles or chapters derived from theses to be deposited in an institutional repository and don't see consider them to be published material And again, many of you will will know. Well Ramirez and McMillan and others in do open access electronic theses and dissertations diminish publishing opportunities in the sciences and more recently Gilliam and dehodas looked at this can openly accessible e-theses be published as monographs a short survey of academic publishers So a number of institutions did note attempts to reduce the number of embargoes based on pending publication Which I found interesting some took an educational approach making available information Or requesting that students check journal publisher policies before requesting a delay in publication They advise that there is often a statement on a journal's website or in the author agreement describing publication terms What you'll see in our own our own Post-ponement request form We have a note planned publication in a scholarly venue Normally does not constitute a valid reason for postponement and we ask that Students list you can see further down on that page publication pending in restrictive venue We Will allow it if if there is a restrictive venue and we ask that the students indicate for which journal or Where which journal they're they're going to be publishing with so that we can also follow up um What we are finding most often is that um The they're the actual restrictions Um are different from the student's perspective on whether there's there's restrictions on on a thesis being available Okay, so back to this so proprietary knowledge 71 percent indicated they would Allow an embargo based on proprietary knowledge So this could be a contract between a research sponsor in the university or funding That is coming from a commercial a commercial company Which has delayed a uh Or requested a delay in publication Uh the next up a fear of persecution or concerns over author or a study participant safety 61 indicated that they would embargo Approve an embargo on these grounds And survey participants indicated that in the narrative in the narrative feedback in the survey that it was these cases They looked at most closely and were most often the basis for an embargo extension Um, I did find it interesting that no university policy that was provided by participants in the study Uh currently recognized protected indigenous knowledge as a justification or rationale for an embargo although so there was no information on on websites or um Just nothing available although 43 indicated that embargoes would be approved for this reason So it seems to indicate that more information is needs to be made available to students that this is an option um either through in in policy Or in uh on etd pages where students can get this kind of advice To highlight the option for indigenous researchers and also for non-indigenous researchers working with indigenous people knowledge and data Uh finally, uh the last uh one uh 10 libraries indicated It was 36 percent of respondents indicated that no rationale for embargo was required of students One noted that uh students are granted an automatic one-year embargo if they wish And are not required to provide a rationale unless they want to extend the embargo period an additional year And at that point a full rationale would be required Okay Something i'm looking into further is the impact that manuscripts submissions as well as other forms of scholarship are having on embargo requests And specifically that those that that involve collaborative teams. This may be within and across institutions um that may have differing in embargo policies and is further complicated When uh a researcher may be working with community partners Um what we're seeing in the rationales that our own institution Sort of reflect this more complex partnership. So for example To publish early would be detrimental to collaboration with others or This is a shared research project members may be negatively impacted if the data is released too soon and Finally the results of the research um must be shared with partners first so um again, there's there's little policy guidance on this and and um It seems to be becoming uh more the norm as scholarship or scholarly outputs are changing Nicole don't mean to uh just want to let you know uh five minute morning. So thank you so much sally Okay, uh embargo length uh i'll i'll Speed up here. So embargo length um if taken together Between up to one year and one to two years That covers about 70 percent of libraries that responded that they would allow no longer than a two-year embargo A few allowed between two and five years. I think it was 30 percent Five to ten years came in at ten and it was quite gratifying to see that um no institution would allow a permanent embargo Extensions 72 percent will allow embargoes to be extended And again all institutions said ultimately following embargo periods of thesis must be made available online only or online campus only option um what I found 78 almost like 80 percent who really said no campus only option is available for theses And 20 did and what I found interesting it was really the small institutions that had the um campus only option available So because institutions provided estimates and bans of both the number Of submissions and the number of embargoes it wasn't possible to determine an accurate percentage of embargoes to the number of submissions But that said there was a study in canada that was done in 2012 that looked at embargoes and it was probably It was estimated between 25 and 34 percent I think it's substantially less now. I would guess if looking at our own data It's more in the range of 10 percent or less um a significant number of libraries don't track this information which makes um this difficult to know so you can see most um even there's um two institutions for example that had over a thousand submissions per year And had fewer than 25 embargo requests, which is is quite incredible Okay, so some just some last like a last couple of points before I turn it over for questions metadata Common 67 percent of libraries do make metadata available during the embargo period Um also 68 percent have the ability to embargo supplemental files separately from the thesis Which is a request that we get on occasion at our own institution And finally take down practices. So 78 percent of institutions Will allow a thesis to be removed from their repository um the rationale provided by these groups is typically there's a couple of reasons why one would be the thesis escaped it was a it was a mistake on the part of the institution or the embargo ran out without the student's knowledge the other digitization projects permissions were never received and so take down is automatic when students request And finally there were a number of situations where an author had requested to remove a thesis because their own career trajectory did not match Their their thesis any longer and they didn't want future employers or current employers to have access to their thesis So with that I will stop with one minute left. I'm sorry sally No, no worries Excellent presentation. Does anyone have any questions for nicole again? You can either put in a q&a or if you would like to unmute and ask please do One thing that I thought was really interesting. Oh, that's a good check Yeah, Roxanne tree says this is very interesting helpful to know what other institutions are doing in regard to embargoes. Definitely. Definitely um one thing I thought of that um i'm I might bring up the next time we're looking at the embargo rules again Excuse me. Sorry Is the idea of making the dissertation or thesis available? But embargoing just the data set or the supplemental information We don't have a whole whole whole lot of those. Um, I'd actually think it would be interesting if we did but That's that's an option that I'm going to introduce to see if anyone else would want to look like they have a question I see timothy's question timothy Only anecdotally, um, I Only I only have anecdotal evidence on on the on the On faculty influence front and I think it's I think it's um faculty have a particular halo that um When in looking at our own embargo requests, I do see it commonly the case that um Graduate students of a particular supervisor will quite often have multiple embargo requests So they are getting that advice from that supervisor to request an embargo um, I I suspect that's the case at other institutions where education and um Support for faculty Would be useful in trying to reduce the number of embargoes. Great. Thank you so much Thanks. Oh, I can't talk. Thank you. Um, thank you very much for your presentation. Nicole This is unfortunately the end of the session. We'd all love to hear more Please make sure that everybody comes to the virtual happy hour at four o'clock We're going to be giving away four o'clock eastern time. We're going to be giving away Some swag. So hopefully we'll see you there and thank you again. Nicole. All right. Thanks. I really have a great rest of the day right for now