1. Serials Review 39 (2013) 1–2
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Serials Review
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/serrev
Editorial
Progress Toward Open Access Metadata
There is a growing challenge regarding Open Access (OA) and it
has 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 mandate, the way OA fits into the complex world of information management services becomes an important problem to address. In addition,
the “flavors” or “colors” of OA, i.e., how it fits on the spectrum of openness, need clarification and consensus. Finally, how OA status is communicated to the wider community—both human and machine—
needs to be addressed. These were latent issues when the number of
open access publications was modest, and for the most part those
early OA journals were completely open. As the number of hybrid
models has expanded in anticipation of the increasing scope of funder
mandates, it is now time to begin to formalize an article-level metadata environment that communicates this information about accessibility and use.
According to the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory
Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) (http://roarmap.eprints.org/), there are
presently 54 funding organizations that mandate some form of OA
publication as a condition of a grant—with an additional 10 funders considering some type of mandate, including several significant government agencies. In addition to these funding mandates, 163 institutions
worldwide have adopted a mandate, and several dozen more have
departmental-level mandates. Many traditional (i.e., subscriptionbased) publishers are moving beyond limited experimentation with
different OA options to full implementation of hybrid models. The
SHERPA/RoMEO (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/) site provides a list
of more than 100 publishers who offer hybrid OA services along with
details of those plans (University of Nottingham, 2013). It is likely that
these numbers will grow organically over time, or they could increase
rapidly if the UK or US Federal government adopts large-scale OA mandates. While the number of authors choosing OA publication in hybrid
environments is currently modest, as the reach of these mandates
grows, the amount of content available in hybrid publications will likely
grow as well.
This fall saw the launch of three related projects trying to bring
some order to the community of OA. One initiative by the Public
Library of Science (PLoS), SPARC, and the Open Access Scholarly
Publishers Association (OASPA) is called the Open Access Spectrum
(http://www.plos.org/about/open-access/howopenisit/). A second
initiative launched by Jisc in the UK is entitled Vocabularies for
Open Access (V4OA) (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus/howjiscworks/
committees/workinggroups/palsmetadatagroup/v4oa.aspx). A model
for distributing article level information that launched last year
and 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 Open
Access Metadata and Indicators.
0098-7913/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.serrev.2013.02.001
In October, PLOS, SPARC, and OASPA collaborated on the publication of an Open Access Spectrum guide that according to the publishers
“identifies the core components of OA and how they are implemented
across the spectrum between ‘Open Access’ and ‘Closed Access’”
(Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and Public
Library of Science, 2012). The goal of releasing this guide is to highlight attention to the broader questions of “how open” content is,
not simply that it is available via open access. These questions include
attributes related to access, copyright ownership, reuse, sharing,
republication, and machine interactivity. Common vocabulary is a
first step in standardization and this guide takes a step in that direction. A secondary aim of the producers of this guide is to advance
the discussion about publisher's policies regarding OA and to draw
distinctions between the variations in them.
A second project, recently launched by Jisc, is Vocabularies for
Open Access (V4OA). Similar to the OA Spectrum document, this project aims to “achieve a consensus among the main stakeholder groups
on suitable vocabularies to provide greater clarity about the meaning
of key terms for humans and machines” related to OA (Jisc, 2013).
This initiative will feed into a larger UK repository metadata guidelines project (the RIOXX project (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/
programmes/di_researchmanagement/repositories/rioxx.aspx)) that
Jisc is also undertaking. Envisioned is a core metadata terminology
that will enhance systems interoperability and facilitate collection
management for commercial, compliance, and reporting purposes.
This project is expected to report out its findings in mid to late 2013.
In January 2013, the NISO membership approved a new initiative to
develop standardized metadata and access indicators on Open Access
status. No standardized bibliographic metadata currently provides
information on whether a specific article is openly accessible (i.e., can
be read by any user who can get to the journal Web site over the
Internet) and what re-use rights might be available to readers. Additionally, there is no standard way that hybrid journals indicate which
articles are open access and which aren't.
Developing article-level metadata and indicators is not without its
challenges. The sheer scale of metadata management at the journal
level has itself proven difficult, despite more than a decade of work
by several suppliers in the community. Metadata describing access
at the article level increases this problem by several orders of magnitude per year. Expression of rights information is another area of
work that has proven problematic for nearly a decade both from a
system and a cultural perspective. This issue is compounded because
some publishers find value in obtaining and managing re-use rights of
content that is available for free reading. Finally, there are supplier
branding and marketing concerns around logos and those communications interests that will need to be respected.
The benefits of having standardized OA metadata and indicators
should have a positive impact on the variety of organizational

2. 2
Editorial
participants in the scholarly communications chain. Funders who
have implemented OA policies would have a mechanism to determine if a specific article or researcher is compliant with their policies. Publishers of hybrid journals would benefit by having a
simple mechanism for signaling the OA status of the articles published under that model. Authors would more easily be able to determine whether their selected distribution option is being
respected and be able to document their compliance with funder requirements. Readers could more easily ascertain if they can read an
article from search results and more easily adhere to the terms that
publishers have established. The many aggregators and discovery
service providers will enjoy an improved mechanism to programmatically collect and surface to users OA articles that are available
in the community.
The project launched by NISO will focus initially on metadata
elements that describe the readership rights associated with an OA article. Specifically, the NISO Working Group will determine the optimal
mechanisms to describe and transmit the right, if any, an arbitrary
user has to access a specific article from any Internet connection point.
Recommendations will include a means for distribution and aggregation
of this metadata in machine-readable form. The group will consider
whether existing bibliographic metadata distribution systems can
store and transmit this information. The group will also consider the
feasibility of incorporating information on re-use rights and the feasibility of reaching agreement on transmission of that data. Those interested
in 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 add
to the structure of providing article-level information to the community. The CrossMark system, which is an identification service from
CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org/), is designed to provide signals
to researchers that publishers are committed to maintaining their
scholarly content by providing item-level metadata. CrossMark data
could include provenance information or information on access. As a
functioning system providing article level data, the CrossMark system
could provide a vehicle for exposing any agreed upon descriptions or
access 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 questions
that arise in an environment where hybrid OA content begins to flourish within traditional subscription-based access models. This should
not be as fraught with political concerns as previous discussions,
since these activities turn on how best to implement a hybrid OA
model, not whether or not to implement one. Once a publisher or author chooses OA as a distribution model, in order for that model to
function properly in a hybrid environment, the systems that aggregate
content and provide discovery services rely on standardized metadata,
definitions, and indicators. At the moment in the ever-expanding open
access environment, all three of these are lacking. For all those who are
investing in the distribution of OA content, including funders who provide the resources, authors who choose OA as a distribution model and
publishers who build systems to allow it are missing an opportunity if
they fail to expose open access status. Just providing or selecting OA
distribution options does not adequately serve the end goal of getting
the content into the virtual hands of as many readers as possible. In
our digital environment, widespread access requires metadata to facilitate discovery and delivery of OA content. To prevent more complex
problems in the future, we should begin now to develop the metadata
infrastructure 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 Carpenter
National 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.