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Open Access metadata, Part Two

This blog post was written in collaboration with Jeff Edmunds, Digital Access Coordinator at the Penn State University Libraries. It’s a companion piece to the original blog post, ‘Open Access metadata: OAPEN partners with Penn State University Libraries’.

This blog post was written in collaboration with Jeff Edmunds, Digital Access Coordinator at the Penn State University Libraries. It’s a companion piece to the original blog post, ‘Open Access metadata: OAPEN partners with Penn State University Libraries’ (linked below).  

In October of 2023, OAPEN announced a collaboration with Penn State University Libraries whereby OAPEN’s metadata was being transformed into MARC records, cleaned up and improved, and then made freely available for download (with a CC license assigned) via Penn State’s institutional repository, ScholarSphere. 

Since September 2023, the MARC files have been downloaded hundreds of times (averaging 200-300 times per month) from many parts of the globe. The visualization below demonstrates exactly how far and wide these MARC files have been downloaded. 

Downloads have originated from 40 distinct countries, with the breakdown by continent as follows: 

  • North America: 50.8%
  • Europe: 32.4% 
  • Asia: 12.5% 
  • Oceania: 2% 
  • Africa: 1.8% 
  • South America: 0.5% 

We are delighted to see such a global reach. This shows how the OAPEN Library is truly a global library, committed to fostering a more equitable scholarly communications infrastructure, and what we can achieve when we collaborate with libraries such as Penn State, who are also dedicated to sharing  knowledge and new ideas with the world. The statistics also give us the opportunity to improve our outreach to libraries in areas of the globe that are not taking full advantage of the freely available metadata, beyond those that are covered in the image. 

Now that the MARC records have been available for several months, Penn State has been able to improve its processing thanks to feedback from members of the OAPEN and DOAB Library Working Group, specifically Erik Lindgren (Information Specialist at the Turku University Library, Finland) and Emma Booth (Metadata Manager for Content Management, University of Manchester Library, UK). 

Given the success of this collaboration, OAPEN and Penn State University Libraries are discussing the possibility of implementing a similar process for the metadata available from DOAB for its corpus of nearly 80,000 open access titles. 

The OAPEN MARC files are updated monthly and currently describe over 33,000 open access titles. 

Silke Davison

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Open Access metadata: OAPEN partners with Penn State University Libraries 

This blog post was written in collaboration with Jeff Edmunds, Digital Access Coordinator at the Penn State University Libraries. 

For many years, OAPEN has made metadata describing the titles in its collection freely available for download on its website. 

But since OAPEN’s metadata originates with publishers, of which there are over four hundred included in the OAPEN Library, ensuring metadata quality and consistency is challenging. The MARCXML file that is available on the OAPEN site, for example, can be easily transformed into MARC – the metadata format favored by libraries worldwide – but the MARC data can be both error-ridden and incomplete. 

Many libraries therefore rely on metadata supplied by third party for-profit entities rather than acquiring the metadata from its source, OAPEN. 

To address this less-than-optimal situation, the Penn State University Libraries are collaborating with OAPEN to provide MARC records for the entire OAPEN corpus, freely available via Penn State’s institutional repository, ScholarSphere, and licensed for reuse under a CC BY 4.0 license. 

The Penn State Libraries download the MARCXML file of metadata from the OAPEN site once a month, transform the records into MARC, and run a series of scripts to clean and improve the data.  

“Cleaning the data, standardizing it, and making certain it complies with the MARC standard allows us to give back to the Open Access community. Libraries who want access to good quality MARC records for their Open Access titles now have an option to acquire them without cost and with no legal strings attached,” said Jeff Edmunds, Digital Access Coordinator at the Penn State University Libraries. 

For Open Access titles to be visible and findable in library discovery systems, good metadata is essential. Ideally, the metadata should also be open. 

“Our collaboration with Penn State allows us to provide metadata for OAPEN titles in a format most suited for easy absorption into library catalogs: MARC. What Jeff Edmunds and his colleagues are doing will allow libraries to acquire good quality MARC records for OAPEN titles that can be freely shared and manipulated, at no cost,” said Ronald Snijder, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Research at OAPEN. 

The OAPEN MARC records are available in ScholarSphere. 

The MARC files will be updated monthly to include records for the entire OAPEN corpus. 

“Our long-term goal is to create an infrastructure that allows the collaborative creation, maintenance, and sharing of open metadata for Open Access resources,” Snijder added. “This is a first step toward that ambitious goal.” 

Silke Davison

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Open Access Books – Helping small libraries think big

Over the last couple of years, the OAPEN Library and Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) collections have grown significantly. We have seen more open access (OA) books being added, and welcomed new publishers from around the world. Much of the continued momentum for OA books has been made possible thanks to the support of a growing library community: investing in OA book programmes, infrastructures and services that enable not only the availability of these books in an OA format, but also their discoverability, preservation and integration into everyday workflows. 

Today, we are speaking with David Dusto, Electronic Resources Librarian at the Elizabeth City State University to learn more about their engagement with OA books.

David, thank you for agreeing to share your story with us. Libraries worldwide increasingly include our collections in their library catalog. These range from large academic libraries to specialized libraries attached to research institutes as well as smaller colleges. For those unfamiliar with Elizabeth City State University, could you share a bit more about the University and its library?

Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) is a public university that is part of the University of North Carolina system. With just over 2,000 students, ECSU is one of the smallest universities in the system, and it is also a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) and approximately ⅔ of the enrolled students are minorities. Historically, ECSU started in 1891 as a teaching college, and still has a large education school. Today, ECSU is also known for its innovative aviation program. The largest U.S. Coast Guard base in the United States is also located in Elizabeth City, so we have many military students as well. The G.R. Little Library is the campus library. We have a small staff of 5 full-time librarians and two other permanent staff, and we work to meet the research and information needs of all the student body.

Could you share more about your role in the library and how you first became familiar with open access books?

I am the Electronic Resources Librarian, but my predecessor held the title “Serials Librarian”, which shows how rapidly academic libraries are changing. I first became familiar with open-access books while I was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina School of Library and Information Science over a decade ago, and have been avidly interested in the subject of both open access books and journals since then. I am also involved with the university’s institutional repository (NCDOCKS), which serves as an open-access collection for material published by students and employees at the university.

To what extent are OA books a part of your library’s strategy today?

ECSU is a small university and our budget for collection development is limited, but I have found that I can supplement our existing eBook collections by locating high-quality open-access collections and adding them to the library website and discovery system. This has been enormously helpful – usage statistics indicate that a considerable percentage of eBook views through the library website are from open-access items. Therefore, despite the small size of the library and its resources, I have been able to build a large and useful online collection for our students and faculty.

How can OA books further support your library and the institution’s mission?

It’s important for institutions such as DOAB to exercise quality control in what they add to their collection, in order for it to be as useful and relevant as possible. Ensuring that links are working correctly in OA directories will save librarians like me a lot of time and aggravation in the long run, as we won’t have to deal with authentication issues and access limits that we are often confronted with when working with subscription-based collections.

In recent years open access for books has gained momentum, yet starting from a small base with a long road ahead still. Do you have any particular expectations or wishes for the open access book community and how this may evolve in the coming years?

I hope to see more institutional support for open-access book publishing. The focus for OA materials that I have seen from universities is primarily focused on journals rather than books, and I would be pleased to see increased support from both university presses/publishing houses and also from smaller institutions that may not have their own press. This would give authors from smaller universities the opportunity to publish and raise the prestige of their own institution, rather than going through a central system press. Similarly, I would like to see increased support for open course materials, such as open-access textbooks. As textbook costs continue to rise, having open course materials not only available but also adopted by instructors would go a long way towards easing the financial burden for students while simultaneously increasing access to materials.

 

Tom Mosterd

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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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New functionalities for DOAB and OAPEN Library: Selective Export and KBART format

New export format: KBART 

This month we have introduced a new metadata format: KBART. Adding the KBART export format to both DOAB and the OAPEN Library has been requested by the library community and offers another option for exporting our metadata and seamlessly connecting to the metadata and to open access books. The KBART export format is now available alongside the other metadata feeds on the OAPEN and DOAB websites.

Selective Export 

In addition to the KBART format we have introduced a ‘selective export’ functionality for the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) & the OAPEN Library. This enables users of both platforms to export books and chapters in a flexible way: first by selecting the relevant titles and secondly by choosing the export format. 

The selective export functionality makes it easier for specialist libraries, subject repositories and frequent users to only retrieve specified subsets of open access books according to their preferences. Please be aware that this export function is optimised for sets up to 500 titles. 

How to use the Selective Export

Step 1: Search for books

Step 2: If needed, you can refine the export even further

Step 3: Select the export format

Step 4: The metadata becomes directly available 

If you have questions about these new functionalities or wish to share feedback, please contact Ronald Snijder (r.snijder[@]oapen.org). 

 

Tom Mosterd

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Tour de Bibliothèque: The OAPEN Library SCOAP³ for Books collection

The OAPEN Library is a growing virtual library of open access books. Researchers and curious readers find their way to the OAPEN Library via a number of entrances. As they browse, land upon or virtually stroll through the OAPEN Library, what unique books may one discover on its bookshelves? Today we’ll take a tour through the high energy physics section, where we’ll find the latest collection added to the OAPEN Library: the SCOAP³ for Books collection.

Open access books in high energy physics

The SCOAP³ for Books collection currently includes over 20 open access books in high energy physics and will, as part of this pilot initiative, grow to include a set of over 100 important texts within the discipline. 

This collection includes titles such as “The Standard Model and Beyond’’ written by Paul Langacker, part of the High Energy Physics, Cosmology, and Gravitation series published by Taylor and Francis (2017). This open access book provides an advanced introduction to the physics and formalism of the standard model and other non-abelian gauge theories. It provides a solid background for understanding supersymmetry, string theory, extra dimensions, dynamical symmetry breaking, and cosmology.

Next to this readers may encounter the open access book “Challenges And Goals For Accelerators In The XXI Century’’, edited by Stephen Myers & Oliver Brüning and published by World Scientific Publishing Company (2016). This book describes the past 100 years of accelerator development with a special focus on the technological advancements in the field, the connection of the various accelerator projects to key developments and discoveries in the Standard Model, how accelerator technologies open the door to other applications in medicine and industry, and finally presents an outlook of future accelerator projects for the coming decades.

The role of books for SCOAP³ 

These open access books are made available thanks to the work of SCOAP³ – the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. SCOAP³ enables open dissemination of global research outputs in high energy physics and was first introduced in 2012, with the support of the European Organization of Nuclear Research (CERN).

So what is the role of the academic book for SCOAP³ and within high energy physics more generally?

The overall objective for SCOAP3 is to enable global, equitable open access for research in the discipline of high energy physics. Having successfully converted the majority of the journal literature in the discipline to open, the Consortium decided to expand the scope of the initiative to include academic books in high energy physics and related disciplines (such as accelerator physics and instrumentation).

“Through the support of members of the consortium and partnerships with key publishers, we are making important texts in our domain completely free for students, faculty and researchers around the world. The COVID19 pandemic demonstrated how important it is for content to be widely and seamlessly accessible, and we are committed to a future where research and academic texts are available openly to anyone who might need them.”  – Dr. Kamran Naim, Head of Open Science, CERN

OAPEN Library collection services 

Thanks to the partnership between SCOAP³ for Books and the OAPEN Library, the SCOAP³ for Books collection benefits from the various OAPEN Library collection services. These include hosting, digital preservation, dissemination and usage reporting.

The OAPEN Library includes these books as part of its metadata feeds, API schema and OAI-PMH harvesting protocol. This enables a wide range of organisations such as academic libraries, library intermediaries, research institutions, and discovery services (including Google Scholar) to provide visibility for these open access books around the world.

In the course of the next few months, more titles can be expected to be added to this unique collection of open access books.

Tom Mosterd

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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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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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