Since 2006, the University of Bologna has provided qualified staff and the technological infrastructure for the collection, storage, publication and on-line dissemination of degree theses in electronic format through AMS Laurea.
AMS Laurea is the University's repository for the dissertations of degree courses and single-cycle master's degrees that have joined the service.
The service offers advanced search functions, browsing, aggregated display by supervisor, by year and by course of study, guarantees indexing of dissertations on search engines and the main international catalogues (WorldCat, BASE, CORE, Google Scholar) and provides access/download statistics.
Each deposited dissertation is assigned a persistent URI that ensures accessibility and traceability on the web over time, as well as enabling correct citation.
AMS Laurea allows degree theses to be published under licences that favour their discovery, study, sharing and re-use according to the principles of Open Science, implementing specific licences, including Creative Commons licences. Alternatively, access can be restricted to users with institutional University credentials. The service also offers the possibility of setting a period of temporary closure (embargo) of the thesis. All choices regarding access level, user licence and possible embargo must be agreed upon in advance with the supervisor.
AMS Laurea automatically derives the thesis files, their metadata and legal authorisations (access level and user licence) from StudentiOnLine (SOL) after the thesis has been discussed and finalised. After the dissertation has been uploaded to SOL, there is an additional step in which the student chooses whether or not to deposit the dissertation on AMS Laurea. All dissertations are archived for long-term storage in ParER regardless of the choice of deposit in AMS Laurea.

 

AlmaDL offers support, in particular for:

  • presentation of the service to students and lecturers
  • training of service contact persons and validators
  • legal support in copyright matters;
  • choice of possible embargo period;
  • choice of user licence.


How to join the service

To activate a course in AMS Laurea, the course contact person must:

  • send a request email to ;
  • send the extract of the Course Council resolution authorising the activation of the service;
  • identify a service contact person who will validate the theses before depositing them.