On March 11, 2013, the Degree Regulations (Ordinance of the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture No. 9 of 1953) were revised. The dissertations pertaining to the doctor’s degrees conferred by universities or the National Institution for Academic Degrees and University Evaluation on or after April 1, 2013, are now required to be published via the Internet. Accordingly the National Diet Library (NDL) changes the method of providing doctoral dissertations as below.

The accession of doctoral dissertations in Japan was started in 1935, when the jurisdiction of storing doctoral dissertations was transferred from the (then) Ministry of Education to the (then) Imperial Library, one of the predecessors of the NDL. After the NDL succeeded the Imperial Library, it continued to acquire and store the doctoral dissertations transferred from the Ministry of Education, and has provided them to the public. The Notice on the Report of Conferring Doctors’ Degrees (issued by the Director-General of the Higher Education Bureau, Ministry of Education, Science and Culture/Mondaidai No. 150 issued in 1975) allowed the NDL to directly receive the doctoral dissertations from the degree conferrers.

According to the new revisions, the doctoral dissertations are required to be published not in print but via the Internet. The NDL has exhaustively acquired the doctoral dissertations as an important collection that contributes to the dissemination and utilization of the academic research results. After the revision, the NDL will continue to exhaustively acquire the doctoral dissertations, will complement their storage and provision by the conferring universities, and will provide for their long-term preservation.

The NDL provides the doctoral dissertation collection as below.

(1) Reader services
The doctoral dissertations in digital form, as well as the printed ones, are available within the premises.

(2) Copying service
The NDL furnishes copies of doctoral dissertations, whether they are in digital form or printed form, within the scope of the Copyright Act; in case of digital ones, however, the service is not provided until the system and operations are duly in place.

(3) Provision via the Internet
The doctoral dissertations in digital form which are not published in the institutional repositories of conferrers will be provided by the NDL via the Internet, if permission for transmission has been granted to the NDL.

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