Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 10(1), eP14421.
DOI: 10.31274/jlsc.14421
Abstract
Universities are attempting to ensure that all of their research is publicly accessible because of funding mandates. Many universities have established campus open access (OA) repositories but are struggling with how to upload millions of manuscripts under numerous license agreements while also linking metadata to make them discoverable. To do this manually requires around 15 minutes per manuscript from an experienced librarian. The time and cost to do this campus-wide is prohibitive. To radically reduce the time and costs of this process and to harvest all past work, this article reports on the development and testing of a free and open source (FOSS) JavaScript-based application, aperta-accessum, which does the following: 1) harvests names and emails from a department’s faculty webpage; 2) identifies scholars’ Open Researcher and Contributor IDentifiers (ORCID iDs); 3) obtains digital object identifiers (DOIs) of publications for each scholar; 4) checks for existing copies in an institution’s OA repository; 5) identifies the legal opportunities to provide OA versions of all of the articles not already in the OA repository; 6) sends authors emails requesting a simple upload of author manuscripts; and 7) adds link-harvested metadata from DOIs with uploaded preprints into a bepress repository; the code can be modified for additional repositories.
Source: 10.31274/jlsc.14421
The results of this study show that, in the administrative time needed to make a single document OA manually, aperta-accessum can process approximately five entire departments worth of peer-reviewed articles. Following best practices discussed, it is clear that this open-source OA harvester enables institutional library’s stewardship of OA knowledge on a mass scale for radically reduced costs.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
