Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

DocTA (doctoral theses)

DocTA (Doctoral Theses Archive) is the Institutional Repository for the doctoral theses of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. DocTA has been developed according to the international technological standards of the Open Archive Initiative PMH, in order to facilitate open and free access to scientific literature on the Internet.

The Open Access Movement

The Open Access movement is promoted by lots of universities, research institutions, funding agencies, libraries, and other well-established organization etc. which encourage their researchers/grant recipients to publish their works in open archives to grant not only a free, worldwide, right of access to, but also a license to copy, print, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly with respect to the existing legal copyright framework.

DocTA contents

In DocTA you can find all the doctoral theses of Milan and Piacenza campuses as from academic year 2005/2006 and view all their metadata (title, author, editor, advisor, Italian and English abstracts, issue date, identifier for citations and links etc.). The relevant full texts are available according to the consent given by each author.
DocTA's infrastructure has been built following the international standard OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), which makes DocTA interoperable and enables information exchange not only among different open access repositories but also among repositories and general and / or speciality search engines (like Google Scholar, Scientific commons, etc.). This gives the opportunity to be part of an international research network.

DocTA runs on DSpace, a digital asset management open source software, used by major research institutions, for their institutional or disciplinary repositories of electronic format documents.

Guidelines

DocTA has been developed also taking into consideration the guidelines published (in Italian) by CRUI (Conference of Rectors of Italian Universities) open access workgroup in November 2007. These guidelines aim at providing a national standard for theses repositories so as to interact with current European projects, such as DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research).

UCSC membership

The Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore is a member of NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations) an international organization promoting dissemination and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations.
DocTA has been the frist actual sign of the support by our Institution to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities which has been signed in December 2006.

Access and use of materials in DocTA

Access to and use of the material, any metadata and texts attached held within DocTA imply acceptance of the following terms and conditions, in compliance with regulations on copyright and intellectual property rights:

  • contents in DocTA are made freely available only for non-commercial private study or research
  • you agree to acknowledge in any publication, whether printed, electronic or broadcast, based wholly or in part on the theses in DocTA, original author / creator and any piece of information contained in the "citation", i.e. family name, name, title, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, cycle, academic year, University campus of any part of the collections. You must obtain written permission from all appropriate rights owner/s if you wish to copy any part of the theses in DocTA for a direct or indirect commercial purpose

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore is not responsible for the accuracy of the contents in DocTA, as well as for the results of reliance on any such information.

A few words on copyright

Works published on the Internet are protected under copyright laws just like those in paper format. Technology has only enabled a new means of publishing and therefore of access.

Italian copyright law (in Italian):

  • Legge 22 aprile 1941, No. 633 and further modifications and/or integrations (from the website Altalex)

Hints for Ph.D. students (in Italian):

Other resources on open access publishing and copyright: