ISLAMABAD, May 6: The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has decided to set up a research repository having a complete record of PhD theses accepted by the universities of the country, Dawn has learnt. It will be a kind of online book bank for the use of students, teachers and higher education institutions, the commission officials said.

The repository will be a mechanism for long-term preservation and archiving of PhD theses published in the local universities.

Guided by the principle that PhD theses are public information, all theses will be systematically collected from the institutions and entered into the repository.

The repository will provide a search mechanism to browse theses and dissertations by subject and source institution wise and will allow public viewing of any document through the hosting of PDFs of the full-text. Until all PDF versions are scanned, the HEC will arrange delivery of documents on request.

Where allowed by publishers, this repository will contain the full-text of research articles of Pakistani authors published in both international and local journals. If full-text hosting is not allowed, article metadata (with abstracts) with linking to the full-text on the publisher site will be made available.

Research publications in this repository will be categorized on the basis of subjects, source institutions and departments to provide an overall view of research conducted in Pakistan at various strata.

The project is being implemented with the assistance of Lund University Libraries (Sweden), pioneers in the Open Access Movement and Institutional Repositories.

PhD scholarship: The Higher Education Commission (HEC) on Friday announced the results of PhD scholarships in engineering and sciences disciplines for Germany.

According to an official statement, candidates who appeared for interviews on April 27-28 have been provisionally selected for PhD studies in Germany under the project “PhD Scholarships for Engineering and Sciences in Germany”.

The successful candidates are: Shazia Bashir (120045), Mohammad Yasir (130031), Usman Khalid Awan (200013), Assad Farooq (110061), Zulfiqar Ali (120066), Faqir Zarrar Yousaf (S440009), Shawkat Ali (490033), Mazhar Ali (110020), Mohammad Umer Arshad (120037), Fahim Gohar Awan (120058), Abdul Aziz Bhatti (120065), Khalid Mehmood (120025), Mahboob Iqbal (110025), Mohammad Arshad Islam (110049), Azizuddin (110010), Awais Mansoor (110009), Mohammad Aqeel Rashad (110078), Mudassar Razzaq (120042), Mohammad Shahzad (A410071), Asif Mahmood (A410092), Nahid Akhtar (A420031) and Adeel Israr (A410009).