Report From Open Access Discovery Workshop at the British Library

From a British Library Living Knowledge Blog Post by Dimity Flanagan, Scholarly Communications Lead at the British Library:

On Friday 21 September 2018, the following organisations met at the British Library:

• Arcadia Fund
• BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
• British Library
• COAR: Confederation of Open Access Repositories
• CORE
• Crossref
• DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals
• EMBL-EBI: Europe PMC
• Impactstory
• Internet Archive
• Jisc
• Open Access Button
• ORCID (unable to attend on the day but involved in preparations and post workshop collaboration)
• University College Cork (attendee also the Chair of the Infrastructure Working Group of the Irish National Open Research Forum)

Three major themes arose from the day’s discussions: identifiers and metadata, user experience and sustainability. Poor licence metadata is an ongoing problem for organisations such as Crossref and DOAJ, who find that many publishers do not understand what is required in the licence field. However, while everyone in the room would like to see this situation improve, many of the discovery tools have found alternative ways to check document access. That being said, improved licence metadata would allow for an enhancement of Crossref services, such as an Open Access (OA) flag on records.
A more urgent issue was that of user experience, this encompassed many facets including versioning, repository deposit, and the challenge of reaching those outside of academia. There is increasing competition from commercial solutions which reduce the number of clicks to the full text of an article, and we must keep pace with these improvements. The idea of a design-jam was raised as a possible way for organisations to look at better user experience. As for the challenges of reaching those outside of academia, it was acknowledged that we need to engage in new communication channels. One suggestion was to outreach to school librarians who can incorporate OA discovery into digital literacy education.

Learn More, Read the Complete Workshop Report
See Also: Open Access Discovery Roadmap 2018 
1 page; PDF.

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Libraries, News, Open Access, Scholarly Communications