Undergraduate and master’s theses in open access at University of Rijeka

The goal of this paper was to research different aspects of open access undergraduate and master’s theses, available in digital repository of the University of Rijeka. Research data were analyzed with regard to the fields of science and institutions within which theses were created, as well as with regard to the dates of their publishing. Research data were acquired using the quantitative content analysis of the data from the repository. It was found out that 38.7% of documents in the repository are undergraduate theses (8827 documents) and about 39% of documents are master’s thesis (8902 documents). About 20% of undergraduate theses and 25% of master’s thesis are published as 'open access' documents, which means that anybody can read them. The percentage of OA theses defended from 2016 to 2021 is increasing. However, there are not many OA theses which were created in the year 2015 and before. There are large variations in the percentages of OA theses created at different institutions within the university. For example, at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences almost all theses are published in open access, while at Faculty of Economics and Business there is no theses published in open access.