Data Analysis and Discussion (Week 3)

The growing popularity of the World Wide Web in the late 1990s and early 2000s provided the low-cost distribution technology needed for the creation of online journals. Both open access content and licensed content are experiencing a full-speed-ahead momentum, and libraries are finding ways to adopt and absorb the results.

The Directory of Open Access Journals provides content to 4184 journals among which, “currently 1538 journals are searchable at article level” (http://www.doaj.org, May 30, 2009). Searching by article title is possible via the directory when journal owners have supplied the directory with article metadata, which they are encouraged to do.

“There are approximately 21,000 active, peer-reviewed learned journals publishing about 1.4 million articles each year. About one million unique authors publish articles each year for a global audience of roughly 10–15 million readers located in about 10,000 institutions. The number of journals and articles continues to grow: each year the number of articles increases by 3%, the number of journals by about 3.5%. This growth has been relatively consistent over the last couple of hundred years. Its cause is surprisingly simple: the growth in the number of researchers in the world” (Mabe, 2006, p.56).



Given the volume and growth of this content, there is a sense of urgency among academic institutions and libraries to establish efficient functional protocols that will result in the most success for user access and at the least cost. One such protocol has been requiring contribution to open access depositories.

In 2007, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences established a mandate requiring open access participation. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) established their mandate in 2008. Over a dozen other U.S. colleges and universities have mandates in the works (Van Orsdel, 2009, p.36).

While you can measure an obvious increase in the use of licensed online resources, a cost benefit analysis is not as readily available for open access content. For example, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has collected a few years of usage data for 80 different licensed resources. While availability of usage stats and costs differs between these two types of resources, there is evidence that open access usage could outpace licensed resources. "Ayris (2005) reported that articles in open access archives are from two to five times more likely to be cited and read than those in subscription sources" (Armstrong, 2006, p.5).

Open access resources can be much easier to link to and cite because they don’t use barriers. Licensed resources are required to enforce barriers in order to keep access routed to paid subscribers only. Open access content can be received by anyone, for example, by typing in the article title into Google. Also, once a user has the article, there aren't unexpected hoops to jump through with regard to printing, emailing, and copy/pasting limitations that may or may not be imposed on the licensed material.

However even though content is open access it may not be easy to access. Connecting to the resource via cross-linking and aggregator searches is aided by well-developed metadata within the content and the records of the content. The development of metadata strategies is in many ways at the core of the development of access to both open access and licensed resources.

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability standards for metadata. While OAI had its roots in open access, its work aids interoperability of potentially any online resources as well. OAI's vision is "a network of rich services built from harvested structured information" (Lagoze, 2003, p.118). This vision relies on interoperable data coming from the local and publisher levels. The time-consuming process of adding and converting details into standard formats like XML pays off on the larger scale at the network level. Networking metadata relies heavily on standards associated with data transfers. At the network level, decisions have to be made about what will be easiest to maintain, for example combining "an OAI-PMH server in tandem with an existing Web server (e.g. Apache)..." (Lagoze, 2003, p.118).

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) mandates that metadata should be compatible with Dublin Core in order to increase interoperability. The reality of the cost of preparing and integrating content for publishing was discussed in the 2006 Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on digital libraries. One finding was that staff to implement Dublin Core and OAI-PMH and integrate them into NSDL was often actually one person working part time.

Funding for local data collections is not generally the same as that for grander scale projects where there is more likelihood that a profit can cover the costs. There is greater financial incentive in creating an automated harvesting model you could sell, than in administering a protocol for entering metadata for a collection of 5,000 local historical photographs. The problem is these two have to meet up somewhere on the Internet and they are each arriving at the table with very different implementation resources available to them.

References:
Armstrong, C. and Lonsdale, R. (2006). The E-Resources Management Handbook:A general overview of the e-resource industry. DOI:10.1629/9552448-0-3.1.1

Ayris, P., Evolution and Engagement: the landscape for Arts and Humanities in a digital age. Presentation at Open Access Debate: what is the future of scholarly communication? St Peter’s College, Oxford on Tuesday 21 June 2005.

Directory of Open Access Journals. http://www.doaj.org, May 30, 2009.

International Conference on Digital Libraries archive Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries. (2006). “Metadata Aggregation and ‘Automated Digital Libraries’: A Retrospective on the NSDL Experience.” session: Supporting education. p. 230 - 23. Chapel Hill, NC.

Lagoze, C. and Van de Sompel, H. (2003). “The making of the Open Archives Initiative protocol for metadata harvesting.” Library Hi Tech. Bradford. Vol. 21, Iss. 2.

Mabe, Michael. (2006). “(Electronic) Journal Publishing” The E-Resources Management Handbook. UKSG Publishing. http://uksg.metapress.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.1629/9552448-0-3.6.1

Van Orsdel, L. C. and Born, K. (2009). "Reality Bites." Library Journal, Vol. 134 Issue 7, p36-40.