Dear Team,

The RMIT Research Repository team regularly receives advice from the School of Graduate Research that an embargo has been approved for an ETD that is already available open access via the Research Repository.

ETDs affected are:

ETD Doctorate (we've labelled this Doctor of Philosophy (PhD))
ETD Doctorate (we've labelled this Professional Doctorate)
ETD Graduate (we've labelled this Masters by Research)

There would commonly be around 20 of these per year with numbers expected to increase over the next few years. They occur when thesis authors request a temporary embargo due to contractual obligations with publishers and/or partner organisations, for sensitivity/privacy reasons and sometimes for the safety of the author or subject/s. These embargoes are often for time periods of up to 3 years although up to 5 years is not unheard of.

The ability to suppress the metadata record and attachments for a set period of time for automatic open access release on expiry of the embargo is required to ensure the author is able to meet their obligations and to provide efficiencies for management of impacted records. These efficiencies will also benefit the thesis author as manual processes subject to human error would be removed.