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Author: Ronald Snijder

Preserving Knowledge: The Power of Collaboration between OAPEN Foundation and CLOCKSS

by Gali Halevi, Collections Director for the CLOCKSS archive and Ronald Snijder, CTO and Head of Research at OAPEN

In the digital age, ensuring the long-term preservation and accessibility of academic and scholarly books is more crucial than ever. Partnership between CLOCKSS and the OAPEN Foundation is proving crucial.

The partnership began in 2022 when CLOCKSS, DOAB and the OAPEN Library commissioned research from Mikael Laakso[1]. Utilizing open bibliometric data sources, this study answered three questions: 1) How prevalent are OA books, 2) what web domains are responsible for offering full-text access to these OA books, and 3) to what degree can OA books be verified to be archived in trusted preservation services. Of 396 995 unique OA book records only 19% were found to be included in at least one preservation service. The results caused alarm and concern for the long tail of OA books. Read more here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7305489 .

Action required! CLOCKSS and the OAPEN Library to the rescue!

In partnership we have connected our services to safeguard valuable longform scholarship. This collaboration has been particularly powerful for smaller publishers who often lack the resources to independently secure the future of their publications. For this reason, we have concentrated on publishers that have added a small number of books available in the OAPEN Library. This group is actually quite large: we identified 164 publishers that fall within this category.

However, this is not the only thing that has come out of our cooperation. We also prepared the OAPEN Library to comply with the requirements for preservation in the Global LOCKSS Network (GLN). All book records in the Library contain a machine readable description of the licence. The GLN checks the licence on those records and ingests content with a Creative Commons licence. And this adds up, as OAPEN hosts more than 32,000 titles that have been licenced that way already and is set to grow!

The Community Comes Together

Community support has been central to the success of both CLOCKSS and the OAPEN Library. By engaging with libraries, publishers, and academic institutions, these services have expanded their capabilities and better served the needs of the scholarly community. The involvement of diverse stakeholders has driven continuous improvement, making OAPEN and CLOCKSS more inclusive and comprehensive resources for the global academic community.

The growth of OAPEN and CLOCKSS has been marked by an unwavering commitment to transparency and collaboration. By working closely with partners and the academic community, we have developed policies and practices that align with the needs and values of their users. This collaborative approach not only strengthens their infrastructure but also fosters a sense of shared responsibility among contributors.

CLOCKSS and OAPEN demonstrate a strong commitment to biblioequity by ensuring the broad and inclusive dissemination and curation of scholarly knowledge from around the world, in multiple languages. This commitment guarantees that all users, regardless of their financial resources or geographical location, have ongoing access to a diverse range of scholarly works. Both organizations promote biblioequity by supporting open access to content, which enhances accessibility and discoverability of academic resources. By providing open repositories and encouraging open access publishing, CLOCKSS and OAPEN remove barriers to knowledge, fostering a more equitable distribution of educational resources globally. Together, CLOCKSS and OAPEN play a crucial role in promoting equitable access to information, supporting a more inclusive and diverse global scholarly community.

Planning for the Future

Looking ahead, the OAPEN Library and CLOCKSS are poised to continue their growth, building on their strong foundation of community support, reliable data preservation, and a commitment to open access. By maintaining these core principles, we will remain vital resources for the global academic community, contributing to the broader movement toward more equitable and accessible scholarly communication.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the partnership between OAPEN and CLOCKSS will be essential in preserving the durability of knowledge, ensuring that scholarly output remains accessible and secure for generations to come.

About CLOCKSS: CLOCKSS is a not-for-profit, community-driven digital archive dedicated to the long-term preservation of academic content. It ensures the enduring availability of scholarly literature by securely archiving digital content from academic publishers and making it freely accessible under an open access license if the content becomes unavailable from any publisher or database. By utilizing a decentralized preservation model, CLOCKSS maintains multiple copies of digital content across a network of geographically distributed nodes, safeguarding against data loss due to technical failures or economic challenges faced by publishers. This robust approach to digital preservation supports the academic community’s need for reliable, long-term access to scholarly materials, thereby playing a vital role in maintaining the integrity and continuity of academic knowledge over time.

About the OAPEN Foundation: OAPEN started out as a project funded by the European Commission and became a legal non-profit Dutch entity in 2011. The OAPEN Library hosts, disseminates, and facilitates the preservation of open access books. The OAPEN Foundation launched the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in 2012, inspired and supported by DOAJ. It indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books. DOAB became a legal non-profit Dutch entity in 2019, managed by the OAPEN Foundation and OpenEdition. The OAPEN Foundation also manages the OAPEN Open Access Toolkit, which aims to help book authors to better understand open access book publishing and to increase trust in open access books.

[1] Laakso, M. (2023). Open access books through open data sources: Assessing prevalence, providers, and preservation. Journal of Documentation, 79(7), 157–177. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2023-0016

Ronald Snijder

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BIC to Thema – after the conversion

Do you happen to be interested in Estonia; Antarctica; Ancient (Classical) Greek; the time period c 1914 to c 1918 (World War One period); Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000; Publishing and book trade; Public international law: criminal law; Pharmacology; Rehabilitation: brain and spinal injuries; Colonialism and imperialism; Polymer chemistry; Ethics and moral philosophy or perhaps some other subject? These and many other topics are covered in the collection of the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books. Each of these topics has its own classification code, and these have been added to the books and chapters in our collections.

For over a decade, we have been using the BIC classification code, which was used by many – mostly UK based – publishers. However, the BIC classification was deprecated in February 2024, and is succeeded by the Thema classification. Thema aims to be a globally applicable classification. It is a flexible standard that allows several groups to retain their unique cultural voice while still presenting a unified subject hierarchy that rationalizes book classification.

Automatically replacing BIC classifications by Thema Codes

Replacing BIC by Thema is by no means an easy task. The OAPEN collection contains over 33,000 titles, and DOAB lists over 80,000 titles. Most titles have more than one classification code, which means that after the conversion over 71,900 Thema codes have been added to OAPEN and a staggering 123,200 Thema codes are part of DOAB. Each record in our database must be updated: which means removing the BIC code and replacing it with the correct Thema code – or codes. For instance, the BIC classification “ACV” (History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900) is replaced by the Thema code “AGA” (History of art) in combination with “3NM” (19th century, c 1800 to c 1899).

As you can imagine, this conversion requires careful planning and execution, and we chose to be thorough instead of fast. It is equally important that both platforms remain usable for everybody: during this process you have to keep on searching and downloading the books and chapters. In practice this means that we did not look for fast and risky ways. Instead, we used the preferred way to update the metadata – for those who want to know more: it is based on the Simple Archiving Format.

This process takes its time, and while all records of the OAPEN Library have gotten new classification codes, we are still updating the Directory of Open Access Books. From this moment on, publishers can add new titles to DOAB, even as the old records are being updated. Of course, newly added books to OAPEN and DOAB must have the Thema classification.

We have updated our documentation to reflect the change from BIC to Thema, and a new version of the DOAB Publishers’ Guide is available for you to download at https://www.doabooks.org/en/publishers/documentation.

We want to thank you for your patience and support. It has been a challenging process, but now our platforms are using a future-proof categorization that will allow you to find many subjects, regardless of the language. We are incredibly happy with the results, and we hope you – reader, researcher, publisher, or librarian – are content as well. As always: feel free to ask questions at info@oapen.org.

Ronald Snijder

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Re-classifying knowledge: moving from BIC to Thema

As you may have seen in our newsletters, we at OAPEN & DOAB are moving from the BIC classification to the new Thema classification.

A little background

Why are we doing this? The subjects of the books and chapters in the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) are described in two ways: through keywords and a classification code. Keywords are flexible, but also language-dependent and unstructured. In contrast, a classification is independent of language and highly structured.

Landing page of the OAPEN Library with classification codes and keywords

When OAPEN was launched in 2010, we chose to use the BIC classification, which was used by many – mostly UK based – publishers. However, the BIC classification was deprecated in February 2024, and is succeeded by the Thema classification.

What does it mean for the OAPEN Library and DOAB?

For us, changing the classification is no simple task. There are several aspects to consider. Firstly, several data-related and technical changes must be made to our platforms. Secondly, we need to change our data ingestion. This has consequences for publishers and for us. And lastly, there is the actual converting of all the existing BIC classification codes to the new Thema classification codes.  

Starting with the changes to be made to our platforms, we need to update our data model; the input forms for adding books and chapters; the ONIX metadata import; our metadata export feeds; the search API, and it also affects the OAI harvesting of books from Göttingen University Press, FWF and Knowledge Unlatched. Currently, in cooperation with our technical partner Atmire, this has been set up in a test environment. 

What is true for a tango also applies to data ingestion: it takes two partners. On the one hand, publishers need to be aware that they should provide us with Thema classification codes – preferably starting from now. It’s great that many publishers are already doing this. On the other hand, we as the other partner have taken steps to automatically convert BIC to Thema. This is based on a conversion table we have developed internally, which you can download here.

The last part of the puzzle is the actual conversion from BIC to Thema in the data ingestion workflow. In OAPEN, there are currently over 32,000 books and chapters. In DOAB, the number of titles is now over 78,000. All of them have one or more classification codes. So, this is a huge task. To prepare for this, we are currently working on a conversion in our test environment. When we are certain we have evaluated this thoroughly, we can do it in our production environment.  

Sign: "UTILITY WORK AHEAD"

When will we move to Thema?

At this moment, the test environment is all set up. The conversion of the existing BIC codes to Thema codes will take three to four weeks. This includes extensive testing and examination of the results. Once we are sure about the conversion in the test environment, we can apply the conversion in the OAPEN Library production (live) environment. This means that the conversion will take place in the month of March 2024. As March approaches, we will communicate the exact date and time. 

Looking at the timeline, the conversion will take place after the deprecation of BIC. That is not a problem. Up until the change, we will make sure that the correct classification is added to the book, whether the publisher has provided us with BIC or Thema. For us, it is more important to do this conversion correctly even when it takes more time. 

If you have questions, feel free to contact us (info@oapen.org)! This conversion is a complex matter for everybody involved, and if there is any way we can help, we would gladly do that.

Ronald Snijder

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Barricading an open access website – reflections on the attack on DOAB

As many of you might have noticed, last week the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) website was unavailable for several days. Sadly, the reason for this was not a technical glitch as we first suspected, but an actual attack on DOAB.

During the weekend of 21 January, someone decided to flood the Domain Name Server (DNS) of our registrar with requests for the DOAB record – a DDoS attack.

A short explanation: when you type in www.doabooks.org, your browser looks up this address in a Domain Name Server, which translates it to an IP address (that looks like, e.g., 123.123.123.123). However, when an attacker overloads the DNS with these lookups, this does not work any more. The result is that the website is working fine, but it can’t be reached.

Sadly, we were not immediately able to understand what was happening, as we did not have any previous experience with this kind of situation. Once the reason was clear, we could take measures. We moved our domain name registration to Cloudflare, a company that specialises in the protection against these kind of attacks. At the same time, we have done this for the OAPEN and the OA Books Toolkit websites as well.

Thank you for your patience with us as we navigated these new circumstances and please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused. We hope that our explanation was clear, but of course, please contact us if you have any questions or remarks.

Ronald Snijder

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Open access books – measured in a context

For over a decade, there have been open access books platforms. Each of those platforms share usage data and when you are an author of an open access book, you would find that it has been downloaded a certain amount of times. But how should you interpret that number? Unfortunately, the answer is not straightforward. The usage is influenced by the language of the title, its subject, but also by the platform: not all platforms reach the same audiences; furthermore, there might be seasonable differences. For instance, usage of the OAPEN Library is lower in the months of June to August, compared to September to November.

So, it would be helpful to have some clarity. A possible solution is a new metric – the Transparent Open Access Normalized Index (TOANI) score. It is designed to provide a simple answer to the question of how well an individual open access book or chapter is performing. The transparency is based on clear rules, and by making all of the data used visible. The data is normalized, using a common scale for the complete collection of an open access book platform and – to keep the level of complexity as low as possible – the score is based on a simple metric: the usage is either average, below or above average.

How does it work? As a proof of concept, we analysed the usage data of over 18,000 books in the OAPEN Library. Each book was assigned one high level subject, and the language was categorized as either English, German or Other languages. Each book was placed in a group that combined one subject and one language. Within those groups, we looked at the usage data, and determined whether a book was having average, more or less downloads.

Between groups, there are large differences: for instance, a German-language book on Humanities with 300 downloads is doing better than average, while an English-language book on Humanities would need to have reached at least 652 downloads to reach the same level. Another example is the difference between titles on Language in German versus other languages. Here, German-language books downloaded more than 250 times are scoring better than average. For books in other languages the bar is much higher: 385.

In this way, we can see how well a book is performing, compared to similar titles. In other words: when we consider the context of a book, we can actually say if its usage is better than expected.

Read more in the newly published article by Ronald Snijder, “Measured in a context: making sense of open access book data,” Insights, 2023, 36: 20, 1–10; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.627

Ronald Snijder

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Books in a bubble

Nowadays, we refer to “bubbles” as online places where no information from outside is allowed in. But in this instance, the opposite is true: the bubbles are a tool to help visualise how well one set of books is performing, compared to other sets of books. The OAPEN Library is an open online platform, and recently we have audited ourselves, based on the POSI principles. However, apart from an infrastructure, it is also a library.

When our collection passed the 20,000 titles milestone, we felt it was time to assess our collection: how well does it perform? That is not a simple question to answer: assessments of libraries and their collections are taking place within a certain context. OAPEN is not a ‘traditional’ library with a mixed collection of physical and digital publications, and our collection criteria are perhaps a bit different: books should be peer reviewed and have an open license, but we welcome all languages and subjects. We are not linked to one ‘parent organisation’, but try to serve everybody.

Three types of stakeholders support the OAPEN Library: publishers, funders and libraries. Both publishers and funders contribute to the collection by making publications available. They will be interested in the dissemination of the books and chapters. For libraries, the composition of the collection will be paramount. How do the titles on offer fit within the information needs of their patrons?

The evaluation of the OAPEN collection should consider these two aspects. The dissemination of books and chapters is measured through the number of downloads – based on COUNTER R5 conformant data. The composition of the collection is measured among two axes: subject and language. Both dissemination and the content-related aspects are paired to the number of publications. So, we have to take into account three dimensions: number of titles, number of downloads and average downloads per title. On top of that, we need to look at the differences between languages and subjects. All in all, a complex mix.

Our solution was to use three-dimensional pictures: the bubbles.

Usage of social sciences books depicted as three-dimensional bubbles
Social sciences in the OAPEN Library collection

The bubbles display the composition of the collection and how its readers make use of it. Visualisations like this help to tell a complicated story in a simple way; a powerful instrument to guide the further development of the OAPEN Library.

More details can be found in this open access article:

Snijder, Ronald. ‘Books in a Bubble.: Assessing the OAPEN Library Collection’. JLIS.It 14, no. 2 (15 May 2023): 75–92. https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-498.

Ronald Snijder

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The success of OAPEN and DOAB in Primo and Summon

The OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) aggregate open access books and chapters, and make them globally available through several channels. We work together with many organisations, among them Ex Libris.

Diagram of the complete input and output of OAPEN and DOAB, where Clarivate is highlighted

Ex Libris – a subsidiary of Clarivate – is a provider of library services. One of their products is the Central Discovery Index (CDI) describing many scholarly and academic sources. When the same content is available through several platforms, CDI deduplicates these records into one unified merged metadata record. It is available for libraries using Primo and Summon. The metadata of the OAPEN Library and DOAB are indexed in CDI.

Recently, we received a usage report from Ex Libris, describing how libraries worldwide interact with DOAB and OAPEN through their catalogues. We are happy to see that more than 1,500 libraries or library consortia have been using the open access books and chapters we provide. To better understand the global impact, we used the Open Alex API to find the countries where the libraries reside, and we found organisations in 118 different countries.

World map, countries that use Primo or Summon are highlighted.

Of course, most libraries did not just check one title in DOAB or the OAPEN Library. According to the data, the combined libraries reached our platforms 1,251,743 times in the last 12 months. DOAB – with its larger collection – saw 75% of that number.

Below an overview of the 50 most active libraries:

Bar chart of the 50 most active libraries

In conclusion, the integration of OAPEN and DOAB metadata into the Ex Libris platforms has worked well for many libraries. This is just one example of the integration of open access books data into a platform. We have made our metadata available to the public domain, and we have made sure it is available in several formats (OAPEN, DOAB), which allows many stakeholders to use it to their advantage. Hopefully, this will inspire even more ways to make open access books globally available.

Ronald Snijder

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How would you describe yourself?

We have updated our MARCXML and ONIX feeds, in order to better disseminate the books and chapters in our collections.

Almost everyone has at one time or another been asked to describe themselves. For the books and chapters in OAPEN and DOAB this happens all the time: many libraries, publishers and content aggregators want to know exactly what is in our collection. In order to answer these questions, we provide daily updated metadata exports – see here (OAPEN) and here (DOAB).

Figure 1 "Self description" - Source: https://xkcd.com/688/
Figure 1 “Self description” – Source: https://xkcd.com/688/

Two of those metadata exports have recently been updated: the MARCXML and the ONIX feed.

MARCXML – Now complying with the NAG guidelines 

Figure 2 Metadata Profiles:MARC21 Records for Print & Electronic Books

The MARCXML feed – which is based on the MARC21 standard – is used primarily by libraries.

The MARC21 standard contains many options to describe publications, and thus it is quite helpful that the National Acquisitions Group (NAG) and the Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium (SUPC) have created guidelines for standardised MARC21 records for print books, eBooks and eTextbooks.

By following this standard, content providers can better support academic libraries. We have now made sure that our MARCXML metadata feed adheres to this standard.

Improved ONIX feed

Figure 3 ONIX for Books

Apart from the MARCXML feed we have also updated our ONIX feed. ONIX for Books is an XML format for sharing bibliographic data describing both traditional books and eBooks.

Just like MARC21, this standard is very comprehensive. It is also quite rigorous: there are many checks on the content. In order to make sure our metadata better fits with this standard, we have made several small adjustments to how related ISBNs or funding data are displayed.

We hope these changes to the metadata allow the books and chapters in our collection to describe themselves a little better. If you have further questions, please contact Ronald Snijder: r.snijder[@]oapen.org.

Ronald Snijder

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Big in Japan, Zimbabwe or Brazil – global reach and national preferences for open access books

To many the internationalisation of academic publishing may mean: a strong focus on global issues, written in English only. However, many academic books are written in other languages than English. We tend to link non-English publications to regional issues, so there is a tension between English as the ‘lingua franca’ enabling a global reach, versus local languages that provide a better cultural ‘fit’.

M. Adiputra, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Now from theory to practice: if you give a global audience free access to (nearly) 20,000 freely accessible books and chapters in several languages, spanning many subjects, will they all choose books in English?

In a newly published paper, we have systematically researched the preferences of readers originating from one hundred countries. By looking at the ten most downloaded books from each country, we can measure the focus on regional topics by counting the books written in languages other than English.

Books, popular in multiple countries

The outcomes of this study do not fit in a story of English language publications as the only or the main source of scholarly communication. There is a demand for regionally focused titles, countering the narrative of the dominance of English as the language of scholarly communication. Instead, this study supports the value of bibliodiversity.

Read the paper here:

Snijder, Ronald. 2022. “Big in Japan, Zimbabwe or Brazil – Global Reach and National Preferences for Open Access Books”. Insights 35: 11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.580

Ronald Snijder

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The OAPEN Library and the origin of downloads – libraries & academic institutions

On a regular basis, we look at the download data of the OAPEN Library and where it comes from. While examining the data from January to August 2021, we focused on the usage originating from libraries and academic institutions. Happily, we found that more than 1,100 academic institutions and libraries have used the OAPEN Library.

Of course, we do not actively track individual users. Instead we use a more general approach: we look at the website from which the download from the OAPEN Library originated. How does that work? For instance, when someone in the library of the University of Leipzig clicks on the download link of a book in the OAPEN library, two things happen: first, the book is directly available on the computer that person is working on, and second, the OAPEN server notes the ‘return address’: https://katalog.ub.uni-leipzig.de/. We have no way of knowing who the person is that started the download, we just know the request originated from the Leipzig University Library. Furthermore, some organisations choose to suppress sending their ‘return address’, making them anonymous.

What is helpful to us, is the fact that aggregators such as ExLibris, EBSCO or SerialSolutions use a specific return address. Examples are “west-sydney-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com” – pointing to the library of the Western Sydney University – or “sfx.unibo.it”– coming from the library of the Università di Bologna. And in this way, many academic libraries can also be identified from their web address. Some academic institutions only display their ‘general’ address.

Academic libraries and institutions, sorted by type
Academic libraries and institutions

As mentioned before, our analysis delivered over 1,100 – 1,121 to be exact – different addresses. The chart displays those addresses divided by type, and we see that many academic libraries not just rely on aggregators such as ExLibris, but also directly give access to the OAPEN Library through their catalogs. The metadata of the OAPEN Library is freely available under a CC0 license, and can be downloaded as a MARCXML file to ensure easy library integration.

Which libraries and institutions are the biggest users of the OAPEN Library according to this data? The most downloads come from MediaLibraryOnLine, the first Italian network of public, academic and scholastic libraries for digital lending; the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford; and Universidad Peruana de Ciencas Aplicados.

We are happy to see that our collection is finding its way to libraries and academic institutions all over the world!

Ronald Snijder

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Finding relevant books without sacrificing your privacy

Web retailers such as Amazon.com are able to find just the right book for you. This is a great feature, but it comes at a cost: its recommendations work because it is storing information about you. The better it knows you, the better its recommendations.

At OAPEN, we do not track people. Instead, we used the full text of the open access books and chapters in our collection. In an experiment – based on over 10,000 titles – we took the complete text of a book, cut it up in blocks of three consecutive words (called trigrams) and filtered out all the common phrases. This leaves you with a small group of terms that are unique for that particular book. The next phase is finding other titles that share the same terms. The more terms they share, the more they are connected.

Using this algorithm helps to find books that are very similar: if you are interested in a certain book, you should also download these books as well. However, it can also find books that are a little less similar: you might use this to expand your research, or to create a collection of books. Surprisingly enough, this algorithm can also find translations; it even works across languages.

Finding related titles in this way does not have to be confined to the OAPEN Library. The same method can be applied to other collections of open access books or even open access journal articles.

More information can be found in this article:

Snijder, R. (2021). Words Algorithm Collection—Finding  closely related open access books using text mining techniques. LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of the Association of European Research Libraries, 31(1). https://liberquarterly.eu/article/view/10938

Ronald Snijder

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It’s the system that counts

You would expect it to be simple: when somebody downloads a book from the OAPEN Library, the system adds one to the total number of downloads. After a while you put the numbers in a report, and share it with the world. Sadly, the reality is more complex. All the books and chapters can be downloaded by everybody, including automated processes (bots). Also, if you think as downloads as a measure of impact, it becomes tempting to inflate it by downloading a certain book again and again.

So, the raw download numbers need to be filtered, in order to give a more realistic indication of the true impact. Many libraries use the COUNTER Code of Practice as standard, which enables them to compare the data from different sources. However, many online platforms measure their visitors using Google Analytics. The OAPEN Library uses both (but we only report the COUNTER data). Together with the migration to a new platform, a new version of the COUNTER reporting (Release 5) was introduced. A good moment to compare Google Analytics (GA) with COUNTER Release 5 (R5).

Comparing the amounts of monthly downloads is simple: where GA reports over 1 million downloads per month, R5 stricter filter lets it report around 400,000 downloads. Again, when we look at the details, the reality is more complex. For instance, comparing the number of downloads per country shows large differences for the USA, France, China and Russia. In contrast, the numbers for Australia, Canada and Austria are virtually the same. When we compare the usage data of each title, the differences are even less simple to explain. You would expect that both GA an R5 more or less agree about the order of books: which book was downloaded the most, which one comes after that etc. But that is very much not the case.

GA and R5 have made their own choices on what is reported and what not. One metric is not better than the other, but we should be open about the choices made. After all, open access book metrics are complicated and we can only benefit from clarity.

More details about usage data and the two systems can be found in:

Ronald Snijder, “Open access book usage data – how close is COUNTER to the other kind?,” Insights 34 (1): 9. (2021), https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.539.
Submitted on 11 November 2020 and published by UKSG in association with Ubiquity Press on 28 April 2021

You might also be interested in the OAeBU DataTrust Pilot or this OBP blog. Things get even more complex when you try to compare different platforms…

Ronald Snijder

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The fitting link

You are probably familiar with USB cables, the type of standard cable that allows me to connect a printer and a phone to my laptop, using the same port. However, the cable I use for my phone does not fit my printer. If I were to use one cable, I would either have to buy a new printer or use some kind of connector.

This is similar to ONIX: an XML standard designed to exchange metadata about books between all the different actors in the book supply chain. Here, the standard also comes in different sizes. For instance, an author might be coded as <b037>Snijder, Ronald</b037> or as <PersonNameInverted>Snijder, Ronald</PersonNameInverted>. Moreover, the current version of ONIX is 3, but publishers who have invested quite a lot in version 2.1 might be reluctant to give that up. These differences in standards and approaches can result in a complex situation for actors in the ebook supply chain; more details in this draft report by the Book Industry Group.

So, at OAPEN we need to make sure that all those different flavours of ONIX fit our import system and therefore we built a connector. In fact, we built two: one that converts different types of ONIX XML to Excel, and one that converts Excel to ‘our’ ONIX standard.

Why two conversions? Because we need to do a manual check on the metadata we received: does it contain titles that are already part of the OAPEN Library collection? Is there – still – metadata missing? Is there metadata that needs to be amended? When the metadata has been checked and updated, we convert the resulting Excel file into ONIX XML and import it into the OAPEN Library.

OAPEN's ONIX workflow

In this way, we have added over 1,600 books to the OAPEN Library. You can take a look here: https://library.oapen.org/discover?query=%22ONIX_*%22&submit=.

If you are interested in trying this out yourself, please mail me at r.snijder[@]oapen.org. But if you want to wait for a more user-friendly and better developed tool, you should head over to the COPIM project. In this project, development is on the way of Thoth, a tool to manage open access book metadata: https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/open-metadata-thoth/release/1.

Connecting different things – whether appliances or systems – requires work and is never easy. But we are trying to create a better fitting solution.

USB: one size does NOT fit all

Ronald Snijder

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Adding the OAPEN collection to Penn State University Libraries

Library metadata and open access

It all started with a preprint. Back in February 2020, I came across the article “Increasing Visibility of Open Access Materials in a Library Catalog: Case Study at a Large Academic Research Library”. Here, Jeff Edmunds and Ana Enriquez describe their work to highlight existing and add more open access titles to their library catalogue at Penn State University Libraries. Simply put, they investigated ways to make it easier for library patrons to discover open access books, by making them more visible in their library catalogue. Library catalogues ingest metadata based on the MARC standard, and the authors discussed recent developments regarding MARC and open access.

Their timing was perfect. The OAPEN Library was to be migrated to the DSpace 6 platform, and this was the right moment to revise our metadata offerings. Thus, I contacted Jeff Edmunds and asked how we could improve our MARC metadata feeds. This was the start of an involved conversation about the general quality of our metadata records and the presence of OA markers to make clear that the title described is open access.

Based on the recommendations, we updated our “MARC exports” in several ways. Firstly, each MARC record now contains both a link to directly download the book – or chapter –  and a link to the landing page in the OAPEN Library. In this way, readers have the option to first assess the book in the OAPEN Library or they can directly get the title. Another improvement was to ‘move’ the license URL to MARC field 540, which helps libraries to automatically process in what way the books can be used. Furthermore, to make sure that the cataloguing software automatically flags the OAPEN Library content as open access, we added specific markup to the 506 and 856$7 fields.

The result

The result of all this? In August, Penn State University Libraries added close to 10,000 new open access records to their catalogue – based on the contents of the OAPEN Library. The import was based on this MARCXML feed, and converted to MARC21 using MarcEdit. To allow for the character limit of the identification field used by the cataloguing software, the HANDLE identifier used by OAPEN – for instance https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/25287 – was shortened to “oapen25287”.

At Penn State University Libraries, this is how it looks in “The CAT”, searching on “oapen library”:

Penn State University Libraries are transitioning from their old ‘classic’ catalogue to a new layer built using Blacklight. The plan is to add an Open Access facet or search limit in the new catalogue, which will allow users to find all OA content as a group. In the updated catalogue, the results look like this:

When we look at a single book record, the open license is clearly visible. Also, there are multiple links – in this case a link to the landing page in the OAPEN Library and a link to directly download the PDF version and a separate link that opens the EPUB version of this book:

The catalogue can be searched online, using this link.

Starting September, Penn State Libraries will update their “OAPEN collection” monthly.

Future wish list

While we are quite happy with the results, there are still some things that can be improved. To start with a technicality, the MARC Leader field is lacking a few characters at the end:

“=LDR  02817naaaa  00349uu” should be “=LDR  02817naaaa  00349uu 4500”. More important is the planned conversion of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)  to DSpace. The new DOAB platform will have the same export features as the OAPEN Library, including the MARC and MARC XML feeds.

Ideally, the descriptions in the OAPEN Library and DOAB would have name headings in an authorised form and WorldCat subject headings. These features will remain on our future wish list, at least for now.

Add the OAPEN Library collection to your catalogue?

Our cooperation with Penn State University Libraries was successful, especially because of the guidance we received regarding our MARC metadata output. We hope that other libraries will follow their example and add the OAPEN Library collection to their catalogue. If you have any questions, please contact me via r.snijder[@]oapen.org, or drop me a line on Twitter @ronaldsnijder.

Ronald Snijder

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Order! Order!

The OAPEN Library has become a highly connected resource for full text open access books and chapters: used by the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB); libraries; data aggregators and search engines – for instance Google Scholar. 

OAPEN Library - connected to DOAB, search engines, data aggregators and libraries

Consequently, the quality of the metadata is important to us and when it came to our attention that not all authors and editors were listed in the correct order, we started looking for a solution. This is not a trivial matter: at this moment the OAPEN Library contains over 12,000 books and chapters.

To complicate matters, the metadata – collected for a decade – describing these publications come from a variety of sources. A manual check was not an option, so we searched for a resource that would enable us to check the author and editors listed. 

We decided to use the freely accessible CrossRef API. OAPEN is a member of CrossRef – and has deposited hundreds of DOIs – but more importantly, the CrossRef metadata database lists over 1.4 million books.

First, we made a selection of over 2,200 books and chapters with more than one author or editor. Using the DOI connected to these publications, we retrieved the ORCID metadata. Then we checked the metadata found against our own records, resulting in a correction of over 1,000 title descriptions. 

Every now and then we will perform this and other metadata checks, to make sure that everything remains… in order.

Ronald Snijder

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