More than 3000 dissertations and theses submitted to the university by graduate students between 1965 and 2006 have been digitized from the UCSF Library’s collection and added to eScholarship, UC’s open access publishing platform. The dissertations are from all UCSF graduate degree programs and cover a wide range of topics such as the pregnancy experiences of black women, AIDS and identity in the gay press of the 1980s, and models for examining the clearance of drugs from the liver.
The project to digitize and make the documents publicly accessible on eScholarship was a collaboration between the California Digital Library, the Graduate Division, and the Library. Previously, the full text of these theses and dissertations was only accessible through a subscription database, by paying a fee, or by accessing the print format at the Northern Regional Library Facility.
Making the files available on eScholarship required working through questions about rights granted by students to the university at the time of their filing. See additional details about the process from the UC Office of Scholarly Communication announcement.
The digitized dissertations join the 2500 theses and dissertations submitted electronically by UCSF graduate students since 2007 and have already been available on eScholarship since 2019.
Reactions from the UCSF community
UC Santa Cruz professor Needhi Bhalla is the author of one of the recently opened dissertations, Sister chromatid separation in budding yeast. Here is Bhalla’s reaction to learning her dissertation is now openly accessible:
Wow, I experienced so many emotions upon seeing the digital version of my thesis. Being able to look back on my graduate work reminds me of how much work I did, some of which got formally published and some of which did not. I’m grateful to this project for making all of this information available through eScholarship.
Needhi Bhalla, UCSF graduate and UCSC Professor of Molecular, Cell & Developmental Biology
Reflecting on the impact of the availability of the digitized dissertations on eScholarship, Christian Sweatt commented:
I am extremely proud of the tremendous amount of work completed by everyone associated with this project. Not only does open access further UC’s mission to make our students’ research freely accessible to anyone who is interested, but this project also enables our students’ groundbreaking research to be discoverable, recognized on a much broader plane, easily referenced, and included in further research. This is a big win for everyone involved!
Christian Sweatt, Student Services Advisor in the UCSF Graduate Division Dean’s Office
Quick links
- All UCSF student theses and dissertations on eScholarship
- UC Policy on Open Access for Theses and Dissertations
- Announcements about UCSF theses and dissertation on eScholarship
- Contact Scholarly Communication support at the Library with questions
Shutterstock image licensed by the UCSF Library