11^th March 2013 the “Zakonniy vopros” (“Question of law”) part of the programme “NTV utrom” (“NTV in the morning”) touched upon problems rather urgent for our social life of nowadays, such as who and why sells dissertations on the Internet, how to assert their rights for authors, etc. One of the reports included parts of the interview with the director general of the RSL Alexander Visly.

Mr Visly pointed out that the Russian State Library had never cooperated with either of the services selling or delivering dissertations or abstracts either in the electronic form, or printed, though many companies not quite law – abiding would boast of getting materials from the collections of the RSL in order to attract more clients.

For preservation aims and to provide access to the texts for the public there had been created Digital Dissertation Library of the RSL. It contained digitized texts of dissertations and author’s abstracts. Readers of the library could also obtain printed copies of the works (in full or of their parts) for private study.

Then, there was asked the question of how to fight unauthorized copying of dissertations efficiently, and the director general of the RSL said, ”I find the way of simple placement of the texts in open access on the Internet the most efficient one. Still now such a solution of the problem would require substantial changes in Part IV of the Civil Code of the RF”.