This document summarizes a presentation on metadata and open access content given at a conference. Sommer Browning from the Auraria Library discussed challenges with discovering and accessing open access materials using their systems. Better metadata is needed, including tags to identify open access resources and information to troubleshoot access problems. Jean-Claude Guédon from the University of Montreal also spoke as a researcher perspective. The presentation ended with a request to Serials Solutions to create a public Summon instance including all indexed open access content.

1. Metadata and Open Access:
Reliably Finding Content and
Finding Reliable Content
Moderated by Laurie Kaplan
Director of Editorial Operations
ProQuest: Serials Solutions Content Operations team
November 8, 2013
Conference Hashtag #chs13

3. “digital, online, free of charge, and free of
most copyright and licensing restrictions”

4. 9,900 journals
From 123 countries
First Open Access Journal

5. About 450
Almost 290
“potential, possible, or probable
predatory scholarly open-access”
• What is questionable - all of the research of all of the authors in these journals
or just the publishing and peer review process?
• Should the author’s paper be ignored based on a poor choice of where to
publish in the pursuit of making the data and analysis available online quickly?
• And how does a researcher know what materials to trust?

6. • As a global directory of periodicals, including journals, magazines, newspapers
and other serials, we strive to list everything published resource we learn about,
and even announced for publication resources.
• We leave the scrutiny of individual publishers’ author engagement to librarians
and researchers.
• We include Open Access publications among the Ulrich’s titles reviewed by the
professional librarians of Magazines for Libraries, another ProQuest publication.

7. • Several well-known commercial publishers have joined the Open Access
movement, creating fully open journals, or hybrids that incorporate open
articles in otherwise subscription journals.
• Are these publications more trustworthy?
• And many aggregators, including ProQuest, have begun to include Open
Access journals in their collections in order to make available in one
database all of the relevant subject-related materials for a researcher.
• Does the inclusion of an open access article by an aggregator confer
legitimacy, or is it up to the researcher to determine the quality of the
article?

8. Note: All images retrieved from Google Images or Flickr.
All have a Creative Commons or otherwise unrestricted license

9. Metadata and Open Access:
Reliably Finding Content and
Finding Reliable Content
• Sommer Browning
• Head of Head of Electronic Access
& Discovery Services
• University of Colorado, Denver,
Auraria Library
• Librarian perspective
• (Slides follow)
• Jean-Claude Guédon
• Professor, Department of
Comparative Literature
• University of Montreal, Quebec,
Canada
• Perspective of a researcher
• (No slides)

10. METADATA AND OPEN ACCESS:
RELIABLY FINDING CONTENT AND
FINDING RELIABLE CONTENT
Looking at How Auraria Library Uses & Discovers Open Access Material
Presented by Sommer Browning
Head of Electronic Resources Access & Discovery Services
Auraria Library, University of Colorado, Denver
November 8, 2013

11. AURARIA LIBRARY
Auraria Library serves the
students, faculty, and staff of
three leading urban institutions:
University of Colorado Denver;
Metropolitan State University of
Denver; and Community College
of Denver.

12. OPEN ACCESS AT AURARIA
 We do not have an official institutional or library open
access policy.
 When you think about open access the typical Auraria
patron does not come to mind.
 When we do track open access resources, we don’t always
have a positive experience.

13. OPEN ACCESS DISCOVERY PROBLEMS
 All of the usual electronic access issues (broken links,
missing content, platform changes), but OA access issues
are particularly hard to resolve.
 Access can be out of the library’s hands
(HathiTrust/Scirus).
 OA discovery issues can affect other departments.

14. METADATA THAT WOULD HELP US
PROMOTE AND USE OPEN ACCESS
MATERIALS
 Metadata to find or exclude OA resources
 Metadata to help us troubleshoot OA resources

15. OA TAGS OR ICONS

16. OPEN ACCESS FACET IN SUMMON
Let us refine the search to Open Access content only

17. MORE CONTROL OVER OUR METADATA
More transparency about metadata
 Where is it coming from?
 What are the standards?
 How is this journal indexed? How is this database harvested?
Make analysis easy
Make customization easy

18. METADATA TO HELP US TROUBLESHOOT
 Contact information
 Email addresses
 Editors’ names
 Statements of responsibility
 Platforms
 Browsers
 Pop-up blockers

19. WHAT CAN I DO TO HELP?
 Report, report, report. Crowdsourcing is a powerful way to keep the
metadata for these journals up to date.
 Become more familiar with NISO standards and cite them vendors
and publishers.
 Specification for Open Access Metadata and Indicators
http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/9845/Open%20A
ccess%20Metadata%20-%20Work%20Item%20for%20ballot.pdf
 Open Discovery Initiative: Promoting Transparency in Discovery
http://www.niso.org/news/pr/view/www.niso.org/workrooms/odi/

20. OPEN ACCESS WORLD?!
And in conclusion, a plea!
Serials Solutions, will you create one huge publically
accessible Open Access Summon instance that includes
all the open access content you index?

21. THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME
And have a great conference!

22. Thank you!
Sommer Browning: sommer.browning@ucdenver.edu
Jean-Claude Guédon: jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca
Laurie Kaplan: laurie.kaplan@proquest.com