OpenURL Meets Open Access
By Walt Crawford
American Libraries Columnist
Senior analyst, Research Libraries Group
Column for February 2004
Many of you know about OpenURL, the standard that makes it easy for libraries to link citation and bibliographic databases to full-text and other resources. You may also have heard of Open Access, a set of initiatives to make scholarly articles available to anyone. One element of Open Access is the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which encourages the creation of institutional and topical archives of scholarly article preprints and postprints that contain harvestable metadata.
There are several open questions about self-archiving as a primary solution to the journals crisis. One is whether the open access provided by such archives constitutes effective access—that is, will people who want the paper know how to find it?
One example
Let’s say I’m a music student at a liberal arts college with a special project that involves some of the links between anthropology and music. My college subscribes to RLG’s Anthropology Plus but can’t afford the most expensive anthropology journals in print or full text.
I find four highly relevant articles in Anthropology Plus. My library’s OpenURL resolver points me to two of them in full-text sources that my library does provide. The third is in an open-access journal, where prepayments by authors’ institutions cover the costs of publication, making electronic access free. OpenURL points me to that as well. But the fourth article, probably the best of the lot, is in a premier journal that happens to be terribly expensive. If the author of that fourth article archived the article at her own institution, how would I ever find it?
At first, I could find no satisfactory answer that would reassure the harried student. “Let AllTheWeb do it” (or “Let Google do it”) isn’t good enough. Sure, the major search engines can spider these archives, making the articles available on their huge indexes. But how would I distinguish the actual article from the comments and spoofs that might outrank it, particularly with 2 million archived articles out of 3 billion indexed web pages?
Agencies can build archive-specific indexes, with spiders crawling only those sites identified as BOAI-compliant. That’s happening. The University of Michigan runs OAIster, with more than 1.7 million articles from 203 institutions as of early October 2003. SCIRUS, a commercial index, includes BOAI harvesting within its free search service. But the student would need to know these services exist for them to do any good. At least that’s what I thought until October 2003.
The OpenURL partial solution
I was working then with Gilles Caron, director of the Paul-Émile-Boulet Library at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi, to test that campus’s homemade OpenURL resolver against 16 Eureka databases.
The first article I checked in Anthropology Plus was in a prestigious, expensive journal—one that the library didn’t have either in print or in full text. But right under the offer to search the local catalog was an offer (in French, but I could figure it out) to search open-access harvesters. Voilà! When I took up that offer, the article was indeed available from the primary author’s institutional archive.
As far as I know, Chicoutimi is the first OpenURL resolver to offer this service. It won’t be the last. The idea has already spread and is a great way to provide more resources authoritatively, something librarians do best. The only cost is configuring the resolver: Once that’s done, existing indexes become even more powerful.
What about Google, offered lower on the resolver page? The article might have been in the result set, but I gave up after half a dozen weblog entries and commentaries about the article, all of them with higher page ranks. For that matter, the URL of the archive itself might not have inspired confidence that it was the real thing, had I not found it through OAIster.
This is synergy at work. OpenURL is a wonderful technology if you can find the right ways to use it. Open Access has the potential for great good if we don’t gloss over the problems and promise more than it can accomplish. Together, they’re even better. Caron was trying to improve research for the students at his relatively remote campus (200 miles from the nearest large academic library). In doing so, he showed the thought and innovation you so frequently see among the best librarians. Thousands of other libraries and their users should benefit.
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