From a Joint Announcement:
In the cooperative spirit of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), four leading academic content providers — Credo; Gale, a part of Cengage Learning; IEEE; and SAGE – today, publically disclose their support of the Open Discovery Initiative (ODI). In NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative: Promoting Transparency in Discovery (RP-19-2014), content providers are encouraged to take specific measures to declare their conformance with ODI’s recommended practice for pre-indexed “web-scale” discovery services, with the goal of increasing open communication and collaboration.
Each organization has published an ODI Conformance Statement, which articulates their efforts to meet ODI’s discovery service indexing recommendations. For example, using ODI’s conformance checklists, all four participating content providers make their full-text articles available to all discovery service providers for indexing. These providers state that core metadata for their publications is distributed routinely for indexing and that this data provides “the content item and additional descriptive content for as much of their content as possible.” In the spirit of transparency, the checklists from these four publishers note any relevant exceptions or gaps in their conformance to the ODI recommended practice.
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The four publishers have declared the following:
We jointly release this statement in order to support and improve cross-sector collaboration in library discovery. We share the belief that clear and open communication is paramount in supporting the libraries that license pre-indexed discovery services, and in progressing industry-wide improvements to the discoverability of scholarly content in today’s library ecosystem.
We see our conformance statements and checklists as living documents, made possible by ODI’s standardized format for communicating the indexing and discoverability efforts of publishers with the library community. We encourage other publishers and discovery service providers to embrace ODI conformance, as a method for opening up conversations across the industry about discovery service indexing.
Furthermore, we believe that collaboration is central to improving academic resource discoverability, and that active and transparent disclosure of participation in discovery services is critical to our collective successes. By shedding light on the often misunderstood aspects of resource indexing, we believe that solutions and opportunities are brought to light.
These ODI Conformance Statements released today are linked from the NISO webpage. Additional information from these publishers can be found on the following pages:
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“It’s gratifying to see the support for the Open Discovery Initiative recommendations from such preeminent content providers, and we hope that others will follow this lead,” said Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of NISO. “We recognize that these statements represent their commitment to transparency and their willingness to communicate openly with all stakeholders in the discovery arena.”
Read the Complete Announcement
Direct to Full Text of Open Discovery Initiative (ODI)
See Also: Open Discovery Resources (via NISO)
on a Related Note…
New Conference Paper: “Information Searching Using Discovery Tools and OPACs. Strengths and Weaknesses”
Paper will be presented at upcoming WLIC.
About Gary Price
