The pilot project "Accessibility, digitization and analysis of historical European dissertations" (Dissify) at Osnabrück University is concerned with the digitization and legal recording of historical medical dissertations in the Baltic European region between 1880 and 1950.

According to project leader Prof. Dr. Hanna Ruschemeier from Osnabrück University, older dissertations are still highly relevant in their field today. However, most of them cannot be used because they have not been digitized. Therefore, data protection and copyright aspects must be taken into account. On the one hand, the project is about creating a prototype for the automated determination of death data in order to enable a copyright check. Secondly, the project focuses on examining the research potential of the history of science in digitized dissertations and, thirdly, on preparing a legal opinion on the comprehensive use of European dissertations.

"Our aim is to release these dissertations after clarifying copyright and data protection issues and to make them available to the scientific community digitally, including in the context of artificial intelligence." Particular attention is paid to the collection and enrichment of metadata to clarify the copyright situation, especially by determining the authors' death dates. In addition to legal reviews, studies are also being carried out into the history of science to examine the significance and influence of these dissertations in scientific discourse. The interdisciplinary efforts also include networking with other pilot projects and the scientific community in order to further promote the transfer of knowledge and the use of the results. These results are intended to be reusable for every institution by means of guidelines, but also to lay the foundation for the vision of a European dissertation platform.

Further information for editors:
Prof. Dr. Hannah Ruschemeier, Osnabrück University
School of Law
 ls-ruschemeier@uos.de