Serials Review 39 (2013) 1–2

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Serials Review

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Editorial

Progress Toward Open Access Metadata

There is a growing challenge regarding Open Access (OA) and ithas nothing to do with its acceptance; in fact it is the exact opposite.The developing problem with OA relates to its increasing ubiquity.As more organizations adopt some form of OA option, model, or man-date, the way OA fits into the complex world of information manage-ment services becomes an important problem to address. In addition,the “flavors” or “colors” of OA, i.e., how it fits on the spectrum of open-ness, need clarification and consensus. Finally, how OA status is com-municated to the wider community—both human and machine—needs to be addressed. These were latent issues when the number ofopen access publications was modest, and for the most part thoseearly OA journals were completely open. As the number of hybridmodels has expanded in anticipation of the increasing scope of fundermandates, it is now time to begin to formalize an article-level meta-data environment that communicates this information about accessi-bility and use.

According to the Registry of Open Access Repositories MandatoryArchiving Policies (ROARMAP) (http://roarmap.eprints.org/), there arepresently 54 funding organizations that mandate some form of OApublication as a condition of a grant—with an additional 10 funders con-sidering some type of mandate, including several significant govern-ment agencies. In addition to these funding mandates, 163 institutionsworldwide have adopted a mandate, and several dozen more havedepartmental-level mandates. Many traditional (i.e., subscription-based) publishers are moving beyond limited experimentation withdifferent OA options to full implementation of hybrid models. TheSHERPA/RoMEO (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/) site provides a listof more than 100 publishers who offer hybrid OA services along withdetails of those plans (University of Nottingham, 2013). It is likely thatthese numbers will grow organically over time, or they could increaserapidly if the UK or US Federal government adopts large-scale OAman-dates. While the number of authors choosing OA publication in hybridenvironments is currently modest, as the reach of these mandatesgrows, the amount of content available in hybrid publicationswill likelygrow as well.

This fall saw the launch of three related projects trying to bringsome order to the community of OA. One initiative by the PublicLibrary of Science (PLoS), SPARC, and the Open Access ScholarlyPublishers Association (OASPA) is called the Open Access Spectrum(http://www.plos.org/about/open-access/howopenisit/). A secondinitiative launched by Jisc in the UK is entitled Vocabularies forOpen Access (V4OA) (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus/howjiscworks/committees/workinggroups/palsmetadatagroup/v4oa.aspx). A modelfor distributing article level information that launched last yearand has gained some traction is the CrossMark system by CrossRef.Finally, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO)launched a consensus initiative in its community to define OpenAccess Metadata and Indicators.

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In October, PLOS, SPARC, and OASPA collaborated on the publica-tion of an Open Access Spectrum guide that according to the publishers“identifies the core components of OA and how they are implementedacross the spectrum between ‘Open Access’ and ‘Closed Access’”(Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and PublicLibrary of Science, 2012). The goal of releasing this guide is to high-light attention to the broader questions of “how open” content is,not simply that it is available via open access. These questions includeattributes related to access, copyright ownership, reuse, sharing,republication, and machine interactivity. Common vocabulary is afirst step in standardization and this guide takes a step in that direc-tion. A secondary aim of the producers of this guide is to advancethe discussion about publisher's policies regarding OA and to drawdistinctions between the variations in them.

A second project, recently launched by Jisc, is Vocabularies forOpen Access (V4OA). Similar to the OA Spectrum document, this pro-ject aims to “achieve a consensus among the main stakeholder groupson suitable vocabularies to provide greater clarity about the meaningof key terms for humans and machines” related to OA (Jisc, 2013).This initiative will feed into a larger UK repository metadata guide-lines project (the RIOXX project (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/repositories/rioxx.aspx)) thatJisc is also undertaking. Envisioned is a core metadata terminologythat will enhance systems interoperability and facilitate collectionmanagement for commercial, compliance, and reporting purposes.This project is expected to report out its findings in mid to late 2013.

In January 2013, the NISOmembership approved a new initiative todevelop standardized metadata and access indicators on Open Accessstatus. No standardized bibliographic metadata currently providesinformation on whether a specific article is openly accessible (i.e., canbe read by any user who can get to the journal Web site over theInternet) and what re-use rights might be available to readers. Addi-tionally, there is no standard way that hybrid journals indicate whicharticles are open access and which aren't.

Developing article-level metadata and indicators is not without itschallenges. The sheer scale of metadata management at the journallevel has itself proven difficult, despite more than a decade of workby several suppliers in the community. Metadata describing accessat the article level increases this problem by several orders of magni-tude per year. Expression of rights information is another area ofwork that has proven problematic for nearly a decade both from asystem and a cultural perspective. This issue is compounded becausesome publishers find value in obtaining andmanaging re-use rights ofcontent that is available for free reading. Finally, there are supplierbranding and marketing concerns around logos and those communi-cations interests that will need to be respected.

The benefits of having standardized OA metadata and indicatorsshould have a positive impact on the variety of organizational

2 Editorial

participants in the scholarly communications chain. Funders whohave implemented OA policies would have a mechanism to deter-mine if a specific article or researcher is compliant with their poli-cies. Publishers of hybrid journals would benefit by having asimple mechanism for signaling the OA status of the articles pub-lished under that model. Authors would more easily be able to de-termine whether their selected distribution option is beingrespected and be able to document their compliance with funder re-quirements. Readers could more easily ascertain if they can read anarticle from search results and more easily adhere to the terms thatpublishers have established. The many aggregators and discoveryservice providers will enjoy an improved mechanism to program-matically collect and surface to users OA articles that are availablein the community.

The project launched by NISO will focus initially on metadataelements that describe the readership rights associated with an OA arti-cle. Specifically, the NISO Working Group will determine the optimalmechanisms to describe and transmit the right, if any, an arbitraryuser has to access a specific article from any Internet connection point.Recommendationswill include ameans for distribution and aggregationof this metadata in machine-readable form. The group will considerwhether existing bibliographic metadata distribution systems canstore and transmit this information. The group will also consider thefeasibility of incorporating information on re-use rights and the feasibil-ity of reaching agreement on transmission of that data. Those interestedin participating in this effort should contact the NISO Office.

Finally, CrossRef released its CrossMark (http://www.crossref.org/crossmark/index.html) service last spring, which could also addto the structure of providing article-level information to the commu-nity. The CrossMark system, which is an identification service fromCrossRef (http://www.crossref.org/), is designed to provide signalsto researchers that publishers are committed to maintaining theirscholarly content by providing item-level metadata. CrossMark datacould include provenance information or information on access. As afunctioning system providing article level data, the CrossMark systemcould provide a vehicle for exposing any agreed upon descriptions oraccess data that might be the result of the NISO consensus process.

The introduction of Open Access has been fraught with contention,posturing, and argument. However, as OA has moved into broader

acceptance, it has become time to address the systemic questionsthat arise in an environment where hybrid OA content begins to flour-ish within traditional subscription-based access models. This shouldnot be as fraught with political concerns as previous discussions,since these activities turn on how best to implement a hybrid OAmodel, not whether or not to implement one. Once a publisher or au-thor chooses OA as a distribution model, in order for that model tofunction properly in a hybrid environment, the systems that aggregatecontent and provide discovery services rely on standardized metadata,definitions, and indicators. At the moment in the ever-expanding openaccess environment, all three of these are lacking. For all those who areinvesting in the distribution of OA content, including funders who pro-vide the resources, authors who choose OA as a distribution model andpublishers who build systems to allow it are missing an opportunity ifthey fail to expose open access status. Just providing or selecting OAdistribution options does not adequately serve the end goal of gettingthe content into the virtual hands of as many readers as possible. Inour digital environment, widespread access requires metadata to facil-itate discovery and delivery of OA content. To prevent more complexproblems in the future, we should begin now to develop the metadatainfrastructure necessary for article-level access data.

References

Jisc (2013). Vocabularies for Open Access (V4OA). Retrieved from. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus/howjiscworks/committees/workinggroups/palsmetadatagroup/v4oa.aspx#

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and Public Library of Science (2012).How open is it?: Open Access Spectrum [guide]. Retrieved from. http://www.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/OAS_English_web.pdf

University of Nottingham (2013). Publishers with paid options for Open Access. SHERPA/RoMEO (Retrieved from http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/PaidOA.html)

Todd CarpenterNational Information Standards Organization (NISO),

3600 Clipper Mill Road, Suite 302, Baltimore,MD 21211, USA

Tel.: +1 301 654 2512.E-mail address: tcarpenter@niso.org.