In Germany dissertations (Ph.D. theses) have to be published. The author owns the copyright. This means a heavy financial burden on young scientists and an adminstrative burden on university libraries. So theses are generally not well documented.
Printed theses lack the possibility of using multimedia (color, simulation, delivering raw data), full text retrieval and immediate online delivery.
On the other hand theses contain latest research results and are thus extremly interesting for other groups working in the same field.
A tool to produce bibliographic meta data specific to academic theses in compliance with the Dublin Core has been developed in the project. An automated upload form has been installed with workflow regulations to tranfer the documents to the local library.
An agreement was arranged with the German National Library concerning the set of metadata and the archiving the electronic full text.
In addition a distibuted theses wordwide network with a retrieval system engine has been set up. In Germany 1 broker and 5 local gatherers channel the access to over 1.500 physics theses at German universities. The European service contains up to now theses from Austria, France, the Netherlands and United Kingdom.The Service is called PhysDis: Search for thesis in Physics worldwide, see http://elfikom.physik.uni-oldenburg.de/dissonline/PhysDis/dis_europe.html

The distributed network is set up to be scalable to include all countries, preferrable mantaining analogously their own sector and then be linked into the service.

The German project 'Dissertation Online' is funded by the DFG.