Gail Clement edited untitled.md  about 7 years ago

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### Originally Posted on the (now-closed) blog *Free US ETDs (FUSE)* as "ETDs freed here"  
  ## Introduction ##Introduction  An increasing proportion of American universities now require submission of doctoral dissertations to open access repositories, eschewing outdated policies that required microfilming and resale by the third party, commercial distributor UMI/ProQuest \cite{Clement_2013}. This significant movement away from mandatory paywalls for American graduate scholarship highlights that the obsolete practice of dissertation microfilming and reselling -- established in the pre-digital era of the the early-mid 1900's -- is no longer the "best" technology for effectively copying, preserving, and widely disseminating academic manuscripts. Moreover, housing electronic theses and dissertations in scholarly repositories affords more flexible and responsive curation of multimedia, executable, and dynamic research outputs not optimally containerized in a PDF file with static supplements. Distribution via open access networks exposes the graduate students' works to broad audiences without the barriers of commercial paywalls, corporate copyright warnings, and outdated, one-size-fits-all file management and metadata options designed for bound paper volumes. 

The following American universities prefer ETD access from open access repositories. Note they are all heavy-hitters in terms of research output and impact, with institutional status noted in terms of Carnegie Classification; top ranking in graduate program size (according to [NSF's Science and Engineering Doctorates Report 2014](http://wayback.archive-it.org/org-963/20160210160522/http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsf16300/data-tables.cfm)) and membership in the prestigious Association of American Universities.  ## ###  This list continues to grow — please feel free to add a comment to let us know of any schools we’ve missed!