Not all Open Content is Discoverable

Over the past year I've been promoting a number of ways lists of references to scholarly works could be used to recruit scholars to share their articles. [See any of my posts on my LinkedIn profile since May of 2015.] In some of these schemes it's important to take note of how scholars have already attempted to share the results of their research with the world.

 It has become increasingly obvious to me that there are a number of cases where an author, a publisher, or institutions with Open Access policies and funding agencies with Open Access mandates have counted on certain approaches to provide open access to scholarly articles but have had their intentions to share fail because their articles are NOT, in fact, discoverable by all the important ways in which readers discover content.

 I've spoken to many scholars about ways in which they share their articles or their submitted manuscripts (a full 81% of scholarly publishers listed in Sherpa/Romeo allow some form of manuscripts to be shared, Sherpa/Romeo Statistics). It has become clear that some people attempt to share their articles but end up doing so in places where their articles are not fully discoverable.

 Just to keep track of all this for myself I started using a grid which had in each row a type of "discovery pathway" and in each column a location which an author, publisher, or funding agency has considered to be a suitable way to share the article. The intersection of a row (discovery pathway) and a column (location of content intended to be open) would be a place to ask the question: does this content face any issues with regard to discoverability?

 This grid provides a mapping of where there may or may not be potential discovery problems. For example, consider one scholar I know (my brother) who has most of his pre-NIH-mandate articles shared on his lab's website. It seems these articles are findable via Google Scholar, but they would not likely be discoverable by any of the library webscale discovery services. (See square marked [1] in grid below). One solution to this dilemma would be to get those discovery tools to include the websites of major research institutions such as his lab in their sweep of content. Or, one could say that my brother (or the scholarly publishing office at his university) should migrate those articles to the university repository.

 Another example would be articles in so-called "hybrid" journals which give the authors the option of paying an advance fee in order for the article to be made available for "open access" immediately upon publication. Apparently some funding agencies have allowed this (and even paid the fees for this) as being consistent with their Open Access imperatives. But it turns out that several important Discovery Pathways are either unlikely or even fundamentally incapable of discovering these articles (See square marked [2] in the grid below).

Month before last I introduced this Discovery Grid to the NISO Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee (D2D). Before doing so I extended the columns in the grid to include some other open content which also may suffer problems in discoverability, namely Open Monographs and Open Educational Resources.

 The D2D committee is now using this grid as the basis for identifying potential discovery bottle-necks. If any discovery barriers are deemed sufficiently important by the committee, then a New Work Item Request may be put up for a vote to NISO members, which would then result in a request for volunteers for a Working Group to assess opportunities for "Recommended Practices" or standards.

 It strikes me that there are other organizations besides NISO which may have an interest in maximizing discoverability of Open Content. I hope they will also contribute to this discussion and perhaps adopt or advocate for recommended practices in their own sphere of influence, organizations such as COASP, SPARC, ROAR, SSP, CrossRef, ROARMAP, etc.

 Feel free to comment on this LinkedIn Post or e-mail any of the members of D2D who are working on this: 

• Pascal Calarco, pcalarco@uwindsor.ca
• Christine Stohn, Stohn@exlibrisgroup.com
• John Dove, john.dove@alzora.org

 There will be a presentation at the Charleston Conference which will be an opportunity to discuss this and other work-items that are currently under discussion in the D2D committee.