The University of Malta seems determined to make the knowledge produced by its students inaccessible to both the Maltese public and scholars abroad.

Many of the hundreds of theses produced every year by the students at Malta’s highest academic institution are simply unavailable. Those that are can only be accessed by visiting the University’s library and manually completing a form that is passed to a member of staff, who then has to dive into the archives to locate the thesis required. Moreover, these documents can neither be taken out of the room nor photocopied. This might have made some sense as a means of preventing plagiarism before the advent of the internet, but in the 21st century there other, more effective, ways available to universities to regulate misconduct.

Making the theses freely available to all is an obligation of the University of Malta. After all, it is a public institution funded by the taxpayer and the least the Maltese public can expect is to have unrestricted access to the knowledge it produces. Making its knowledge as publicly available as possible is also beneficial to the University. Hidden knowledge cannot be used by other researchers, and it is a university’s participation in the rapidly developing, globalised scholarly world that attracts funding, dynamic students and experienced staff.

The University of Malta has already implemented the important step of having its more recent theses stored in electronic format, making the dissemination of these documents easier. However, it must ensure that the high-quality research it produces is available to researchers both on campus and worldwide, particularly those studying topics such as migration, hunting or tourism, where the Maltese and Mediterranean context are particularly important.

Diogo Veríssimo and Brian Campbell

School of Anthropology and Conservation

University of Kent