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Abstract
This article describes efforts to increase the visibility of open access materials in the catalog of a major research library. The authors describe their reasons for embarking on this work, improvements made, and challenges they encountered.
Acknowledgments
The authors are extremely grateful to Brandy Karl, Sanford G. Thatcher, Charles Watkinson, Mike Monaco, Deb Cady, Kathleen Lamantia, Judy Hsu, Nina Weisweiler, Ronald Snijder, Chuck Jones, Faye Leibowitz, Sharla Lair, Holly Wheeler, Danny Kingsley, and Laura Rodriguez for their comments on a preprint version of this article. We are grateful to Amanda Maple for assistance with the literature review.
Notes
1 National Information Standards Organization. (Citation2015). NISO RP-22-2015, Access License and Indicators. https://groups.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/14226/rp-22-2015_ALI.pdf. In June 2020, NISO approved a related standard, NISO RP-19-2020, Open Discovery Initiative: Promoting Transparency in Discovery. https://www.niso.org/publications/rp-19-2020-odi.
2 https://copim.pubpub.org/wp5. We are very grateful to Charles Watkinson for pointing this out.
7 At ALA in June 2019 the MARC Standards group approved new subfields for 856 to enable immediate implementation of open access coding. For a summary of these changes see MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data: Format Change List, Update No. 28, 2019. (2019). https://www.loc.gov/marc/up28bibliographic/bdapndxg.html. These changes to the MARC standard parallel the emerging standards for noting OA status for journal articles.
8 Readers unfamiliar with MARC may appreciate “Part III: MARC Terms and Their Definitions” from Library of Congress. (2009). Understanding MARC Bibliographic: Machine-Readable Cataloging. https://www.loc.gov/marc/umb/
9 Other publishers who supply MARC records are listed in the Appendix below. In this paper we focus on MARC and the flow of MARC metadata between publishers, vendors, and libraries. Mention should be made, however, of ONIX, an XML-based standard created by a consortium of publishers, wholesalers, retailers, and data aggregators. ONIX is the standard by which publishers share bibliographic metadata with retailers, including library book vendors. An ONIX for OA monographs standard has been in existence since 2014: https://www.editeur.org/files/ONIX%203/20140722%20Open%20Access%20e-books%20in%20ONIX%20FAQ.pdf. The challenge is that very few vendors have mapped to it, with JSTOR being a notable example. The authors are grateful to Charles Watkinson for bringing ONIX and this data flow to our attention.
11 The authors thank Nina Weisweiler, Discovery and Account Manager for Knowledge Unlatched, for contacting us during the preprint comment period and offering to work with us to improve the quality of KU’s MARC records.
12 A related issue is that ProQuest and EBSCO data feeds (into OASIS and GOBI, respectively) do not correctly map fields that indicate OA availability. As a result, the screens librarians see when ordering a book do not show the availability of an OA edition of a book.
13 The Serials Solutions Client Center, a tool provided by Ex Libris, now a subsidiary of ProQuest, allows clients to manage their collections and metadata.
14 WorldCat Discovery release notes, October 2018. (2018, October 8). OCLC Support. https://help.oclc.org/Discovery_and_Reference/WorldCat_Discovery/Release_notes/2018_Release_notes/050WorldCat_Discovery_release_notes_October_2018. Our thanks to Tammy Troup at Bucknell University for making us aware of this development.
15 This perception was shared with us by a colleague whose library is concentrating on OA advocacy by using WorldShare, encouraging librarians to look at approximately 400 OA collections.
16 One Head of Cataloging wrote: “We generally do not create and maintain catalog records for open access resources—we try to limit our work to things we pay for.”
17 Northwestern University Libraries, for example, reported relying on Alma and the Primo Central index to identify OA content.
18 University of California at Santa Cruz, like Northwestern an Alma/Primo library, reports adding 506 notes to OA records and to Open Textbook Library records but has not yet done further work to identify other OA titles that might be candidates for OA markers.
19 University of Akron adds open textbooks to its catalog as part of an affordable learning initiative, using 793 fields to collocate them. They also report including some OA journals and books in their discovery layer (EDS) but not in their catalog. These resources are not collocated or explicitly identified by data in the MARC record.
20 Mira Greene, Head, Cataloging & Metadata Services at Rice University.
21 Connect OER - University of Florida - SPARC. (n.d.). Retrieved November 12, 2019, from https://connect.sparcopen.org/directory/501b69e1-20a1-4657-a674-11887e02a613/OA and OER overlap but are not identical. Definitions of OER, like definitions of OA, vary; what distinguishes OER within OA is an emphasis on education. For example, while an open-licensed textbook could fit within both definitions, it is more likely to be referred to as OER. For definitions see What is OER? - Creative Commons. (n.d.). Retrieved November 12, 2019, from https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/What_is_OER%3F
22 Personal communication to the authors from Faye Leibowitz, General Languages Catalog Librarian, University Library System, University of Pittsburgh.
23 The authors thank Mike Monaco, Coordinator, Cataloging Services, University of Akron Libraries, for making us aware of this development.
24 Whether and how awareness of an OA version would change libraries’ purchase decisions would be an interesting area for further study.
25 Survive and Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine | St. Cloud State University. (n.d.). Retrieved November 12, 2019, from https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/survive_thrive/OCLC#1082523243.
26 For example, is an online text Open Access if it is freely available online but hosted by a site that requires the user set up a profile or supply credit card information prior to reading?
27 Penn State maintains an eTD repository for graduate theses and dissertations as well as an eHT repository for electronic undergraduate honors theses. References here to the eTD repository apply equally to the eHT repository.
28 While it is tempting to think of Bronze OA as a strictly humanitarian effort by publishers, there are excellent business reasons to give away intellectual property. In the context of scholarly articles, “strategic donation” may help a journal reach new readers, some of whom will later pay to access content; it may also help the journal attract authors or editorial board members. For further discussion of strategic donation of intellectual property, see Fisher and Oberholzer-Gee (Citation2013).
29 Materials that are in the public domain in the United States would not always meet this definition, for example if they are not available online or are behind a paywall despite their public domain status.
30 LLMC-Digital is an online service of LLMC (previously the Law Library Microform Consortium), a non-profit cooperative of libraries dedicated to preserving legal titles and government documents. Penn State regularly loads LLMC-Digital records into its catalog.
31 NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Program. (n.d.). Retrieved November 12, 2019, from https://www.sti.nasa.gov/
32 Disclaimers, Copyright Notice, and Terms and Conditions of Use - NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Program. (n.d.). Retrieved November 12, 2019, from https://www.sti.nasa.gov/disclaimers/
33 Paired with any of the Creative Commons licenses, this phrase is bizarre. While the Creative Commons licenses give varying degrees of permission for reuse, none of them limit access.
34 Coincidentally, Judy Hsu (a Librarian at University of the West) posted a message to OCLC‘s KB-L list on 6/26/19 about her institution‘s enhancement request for WorldCat Discovery “to display the Open Access symbol next to OA KB links to help spread awareness of these resources/OA movement.”
35 See https://openpublishing.psu.edu/.
36 In reloading the Project MUSE OA records, we came across one title that was now locked—not OA on the MUSE site (Information Technology and the Challenge for Hong Kong). Further investigation revealed that we also have a ProQuest record for this title in our catalog, with a link that leads to a “This item not available online” note. Furthermore, this title is not on the list of MUSE OA titles as of 7/12/19. Was this title OA at one time and subsequently “flipped” to non-OA, or was the record mistakenly included in the OA MARC file from the outset? These unusual cases, while rare, do occur.
37 Containing only 1,192 records, whereas the Excel spreadsheet available at the Project MUSE site lists 1,360 titles. This kind of mismatch between available titles and available MARC records is endemic in the world of OA, just as it is elsewhere for large online collections of materials, which tend to be in constant flux.
38 At https://www.press.umich.edu/librarians. Charles Watkinson, Director of the University of Michigan Press and Associate University Librarian for Publishing at the University of Michigan Library, informs us that based on librarian feedback, UMP is currently automating the process to ensure that cumulative OA MARC files are available. The MARC records are created by the U-M Library Technical Services unit and shared with WorldCat.
39 8.1.12 <ali:free_to_read > Free to Read (NISO ALI). (n.d.). Retrieved November 12, 2019, from https://www.niso-sts.org/standard-html/v1-0/niso-sts-1-0/niso-sts-1-0-elem-ali_free_to_read.html
45 For examples, see https://catalog.libraries.psu.edu/?search_field=all_fields&q=%22Penn+State+Faculty+and+Staff+Open+Access+Research+Collection%22
46 Like many large libraries, Penn State sends new and updated records from the catalog each month to an authority vendor (in our case, Backstage Library Works), who provides updated records (with authoritative headings inserted) as well as authority files for use in our catalog. The more records we send, the higher the potential cost.
47 Such analyses may also, as Charles Watkinson points out “affect the way in which publishers think about the long term sustainability of OA ebook publishing. In other words, if publishers assume that continued library acquisition of print versions of OA titles is intentional rather than an accident of the supply chain, they’ll be basing their economic forecasting of print sales for OA ebooks on a false premise. The idea that ‘OA ebooks drives print sales’ may be simply a side effect of an inefficient supply chain!” Personal communication with the authors, 2/13/20.
48 The Z39.50 standard allows remote batch searching of bibliographic databases, in this case WorldCat. We used MarcEdit’s Z39.50/SRU Client for this purpose.
49 This multiplicity of records for what is essentially the same resource seems particularly extreme in the case of Open Access titles.
50 As an example, Knowledge Unlatched MARC downloads (https://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/ku-marc-records/) overlap with OAPEN downloads (http://www.oapen.org/content/metadata); As of this writing, KU supplies 1,378 records whereas OAPEN supplies 9,197. Subsequent batch loads of records from JSTOR and De Gruyter OA records revealed further duplication of records for OA titles.
51 In a recently encountered example, a MARC record supplied by Brill for one of its OA titles included a URL pointing to the Brill ebook platform, where the title is explicitly identified as OA; a record for the same title already exists in our catalog, but with a link pointing to ProQuest’s Ebook Central platform, where the same title is NOT identified as OA. Furthermore, different platforms serve up OA content in different ways: JSTOR splits books into chapters, each a separate download, making it time-consuming to download the entire book. DOAB, on the other hand, provides single downloads of entire titles. Other platforms also provide EPUBs in addition to the more common PDF files.