Today, globalization affects almost all aspects of human life as it seems that every local activity, whether modern or old, is out of date and ineffective. ETD doesn't have a certain and dedicated institution yet and as we know all affairs related to ETD around the world (like this conference) are conducted by national institutions and universities. In today and future world, with strong globalization trends, it seems that all activities which are scaled globally finally need to be planned and conducted on the same scale. So, we will need an independent, certain and dedicated institute that deals with activities related to ETD globally. It can act both regionally and globally to ensure the quality and quantity of ETD. This paper proposes to have some headquarters to arrange regional activities and one main center to coordinate headquarters. Independence of ETD have many advantages, from focusing on global scales to resolve the likely pessimistic view that current ETD (in the highest level) is affected by some western institutions supporting it. Without a globally organized ETD institution, theses and dissertations remain nonstandard and on a local and domestic essence. Here also arouses superstructure problems because in many countries we may not have any system to evaluate and rank theses and dissertations. There is a more serious problem which is that in some countries scholars can affect and manipulate the results of selecting the best works. Therefore this paper suggests planning a regional (and finally global) strategy to evaluate and rank theses and dissertations. This has three benefits (that are explained in this paper): 1. it will setup a standard that is applied regionally and globally. 2. It prevents authority in selecting superior theses and dissertations process and thus just scientific merits are the measurement units. 3. It offers a new and effective method to categorize and store almost all theses and dissertations globally. There are steel some problems that need to be solved before bringing this plan to act. The main problem is many students around the world write their theses and dissertations in a language other than English. Another issue is copyright. Proposed ETD institution can either buy all theses and dissertations which are written around the world and offer them freely or just publish their abstracts and let the authors sell them in a arbitrary way. The third way is developing a network in which all students of membered scientific identities share and interchange ETDs. In a concise way, this poster presents a new approach to ETD in two ways: First, infrastructure, with the suggestion of establishing an independent center to deal with ETD affairs around the world. Second, superstructure, with the suggestions of organizing ETDs around the world.

On the author:

Saman Jafari is a graduate student in political geography at the faculty of geography, university of Tehran, Iran. He received his bachelor in Software Engineering in Informatics Development Center, Tehran, Iran. His research interests include preparation and distribution of digital, scientific publications and open to access digital documents. Nowadays, he is working on his dissertation which is about the application of computer softwares in Political Geography. He has some new ideas in various fields, such as Human Geography, Internet and digital contents, and Politics.

Contact information:

Webpage: https://tehran.academia.edu/samanJafari

Email: jafari.s@ut.ac.ir