This document summarizes a presentation about developing a solution to systematically identify open access articles published in hybrid journals. The presentation proposes adding Creative Commons license and copyright metadata to journal RSS feeds so discovery services can automatically identify open access articles. A prototype was developed with participating publishers, allowing JournalTOCs to begin systematically identifying open access articles from hybrid journals of those publishers. The presentation concludes that this helps make open access articles less hidden and improves their discoverability and usage.

1. Hybrid journals: Ensuring systematic and standard
discoverability of the latest Open Access articles
By Santiago Chumbe, Brian Kelly and Roddy MacLeod
Presented by
Brian Kelly at the
NASIG 2014
Conference
1

2. About This Presentation
We propose a solution, using RSS feeds,
for the problem of ensuring systematic
and standard discoverability of the
latest Open Access (OA) articles
published in Hybridjournals
Introduction
2
Presented by Brian Kelly at the NASIG 2014 conference
on 2 May 2014 from 13.10-14.10

3. About The Authors
Santiago Chumbe:
• Creator of JournalTOCs
• Researcher at ICBL, Heriot Watt University
Brian Kelly:
• Jisc-funded UK Web Focus at UKOLN,
1997-2013
• Now Innovation Advocate at Cetis &
consultant
Roddy MacLeod:
• Instigator of using Journal TOC RSS feeds
• Heriot-Watt University Library, 1975-2009
Introduction
3

4. About You
Who works:
• In a library (academic)
• In a library (other)
• For a publisher
• Other
Who works mainly as:
• A librarian (working with users)
• A techie (working with software)
• A negotiator (dealing with vendors; customers; ...)
• A manager or policy maker
4

5. Presentation Outline
• Context
• History
• JournalTOCs
• OA articles and Hybrid journals
• Prototyping a solution
• Final thoughts
• Further work
5

6. Context
Current awareness services (CAS) are
important:
 They alert users to recently published literature in
their fields
Everybody benefits from CASs:
 Researchers need to be up-to-date
 Librarians want to help patrons to access the latest
research
 Publishers need to reach new audiences in a cost-
effective way
6

7. Researchers
Timely and personalized awareness of
relevant new research is of the highest
importance to researchers and academics
Context
7

8. Publishers
Early and easy access to new articles
increases Journal Impact, articles’ citation
and subscriptions
$9.5 billion per annum industry
Context
8PDF

9. Librarians
• With MOOCS, smart phones, tablet computers,
‘always-connected’ researchers, Google, OA,
… librarians are assuming new roles
• With the increasingly overwhelming digital data
environment, managing CAS for their patrons
can be an important service provided by
libraries
9
Context

10. CAS using RSS feeds?
Using RSS feeds, we
could collect the latest
research directly from
the publishers.
10
"straight from the horse's mouth!"
Context

11. CAS using RSS feeds?
RSS is a simple standard M2M data exchange
protocol, easy to use and easy to implement.
11
RSS OPML
New TOCs and articles New journals & journals transfers
Context

12. Early Developments
Our initial work was funded by three projects and
three joint collaborations with the Industry:
• ticTOCs (2007 - 2009)
• JournaltocsAPI (2009 - 2010)
• WattNames (2010)
• JASS ( 2011)
• X-PARC (2012)
• LM-API (2012)
History
12

13. • ticTOCs instigated a wide adoption of journal
TOC RSS feeds and produced:
Recommendations on RSS Feeds for Scholarly
Publishers
http://oxford.crossref.org/best_practice/rss/
• Before ticTOCs (2006):
• 4,000 TOC RSS feeds (A few hundred using DC, PRISM)
• Immediately after ticTOCs (2009):
• 11,000 TOC RSS feeds
(6,500 using DC or/and PRISM)
From 410 publishers
13
History

14. • JournaltocsAPI developed a RESTful web
services (API)
• Added 5,000 more journals
• 16,000 journals from 900 publishers
(7,500 using DC or/and PRISM)
• Started to select Open Access journals and
worked with PKP (Public Knowledge Project) to add the
RSS plug-in to OJS (Open Journal Systems)
• Produced a business plan to create a
sustainable JournalTOCs service
• Engaged with early adopters
14
History
JournaltocsAPI

15. JournalTOCs
15
Help researchers keep up-to-date on
new research that matters to them
Mission:
JournalTOCs www.journaltocs.ac.uk is a Current Awareness Service (CAS) -
discover and be alerted to the newest papers coming directly from publishers
as soon as they have been published online.
A free service, for individual researchers, students, librarians and anyone
looking for the latest papers published in the scholarly literature with
international coverage and 15,000 registered users.

16. JournalTOCs
16
The biggest free searchable collection of scholarly journal
Tables of Contents (TOCs) collected from 2,186 publishers.
All major publishers are included in JournalTOCs, including Elsevier,
Springer, Taylor and Francis, Wiley, Sage, Walter de Gruyter, SciELO,
Redalyc, RMIT, Inderscience, Project MUSE, Hindawi, Cambridge
University Press, Oxford University Press, Revues.org , Emerald, Wolters
Kluwer, Biomed Central, African Journals Online, Medknow, Thieme,
Libertas Academica, IGI Global, PeerJ and about 2,000 more.

17. JournalTOCs data as of April 2014
10,100 Hybrid journals
7,650 Open Access journals
6,200 Subscription journals
24,200 journalsTOTAL
JournalTOCs
17
Metadata for 8 million articles published since 2009

18. 18
JournalTOCs
Hybrid journal
Subscription journal
Open Access journal
Demo

19. Demonstration
Screenshots
19
Demo

20. Demonstration
Screenshots
20
On the next screen we will seen that the Diabetes
journal is followed by 300+ researchers, is a
subscription journal, has a H-index of 231, …
Demo

21. Demonstration
Screenshots
21
Note this journals
has no abstracts
Demo

22. Demonstration
Screenshots
22
However over 60% of
journals in JournalTOCs
include abstracts
Demo

23. JournalTOCs
JournalTOCs Web Services - API
Anyone can use the free API to digest, mix and embed
journal TOCs in their own library catalogues, portal,
discovery service, web page, etc.
JournalTOCs
Database
Your service

24. JournalTOCs
JournalTOCs Web Services - API
It is being used by 100+ institutions such as:
• Countway Library of Medicine of the Harvard Medical
School
• Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek (EZB)
• Aalborg Universitetsbibliotek
• Catálogo de Revistas en Ciencias de la Salud
• Open University (UK)
• ZB MED (German National Library of Medicine)

25. An institutional subscription based service to
help to make the free service sustainable
25
JournalTOCs
Video
10 min summary

26. 26
JournalTOCs
JournalTOCs Premium, the institutional version of
JournalTOCs, is used by a range of libraries and
information centres across the world - academic libraries,
large pharmaceutical companies, hospital libraries, an
agency of the United Nations (UN), an aerospace research
centre and a consortium of INASP partner libraries.
Academic libraries Hospitals
Pharmaceutical companies

27. Hybrid Journals
27
A hybrid journal is a journal that publishes
Open Access articles together with other
articles that require a subscription or
payment to access and read. Thus, a hybrid
journal is a subscription-based journal where
only some articles are Open Access
OA articles and Hybrid journals

28. Growth of Hybrid Journals
28
Hybrid
Only Subscription
Gold OA
Most of the journals published by the biggest publishers are Hybrid
OA articles and Hybrid journals

29. The rise of Open Access
OA articles and Hybrid journals
29
Open Access made up 12% of articles in 2011

30. But discovery systems know OA terms
only at the journal level !
30
OA articles and Hybrid journals
In hybrid journals the possibility of missing
OA articles is real and is happening!
BY
BY-NC-ND
BY
journal level

31. Challenge
31
OA articles and Hybrid journals
As hybrid journals are proliferating, it
has become necessary to enable the
systematic identification of
OA at the article level.article level

32. 32
OA articles and Hybrid journals
Challenge

33. 33
OA articles and Hybrid journals
Challenge

34. 34
OA articles and Hybrid journals
Challenge

35. 35
OA articles and Hybrid journals
Challenge

36. Currently no method exists
36
OA articles and Hybrid journals
We Need a Solution!
to systematically identify the free
full-text availability of OA articles regardless
of where such articles have been published.

37. NISO Initiative
NISO is proposing the creation of two new
metadata elements:
Element Purpose Optional Attributes Namespace
free-to-read To define whether the article is
accessible, without charge or
other restriction (such as
registration), to read online.
start_date
end_date
To be defined
license-ref To provide a reference to a URI
that carries the license terms
specifying how the article may
be used.
start_date To be defined
37
OA articles and Hybrid journals

38. NISO Initiative
NISO’s new elements: free-to-read and license-ref
are mainly concerned with defining whether an article
is accessible, without charge or other restriction (such
as Pay-Per-View), to read online.
They are also concerned with identifying the embargo
periods (start-date and end-date).
NISO Initiative aims to be bigger and to cover all
type of scenarios, including OA articles, while they
prefer not to mention OA in the draft documents.
38
OA articles and Hybrid journals

39. NISO Initiative
39
OA articles and Hybrid journals
BUT:
NISO proposal is still a draft under discussion and we need a
solution now!

40. NISO Initiative
40
OA articles and Hybrid journals
BUT:
New elements and namespaces can take time to be implemented,
accepted and adopted
<free-to-read>
<license-ref> New
Namespace?

41. NISO Initiative
41
OA articles and Hybrid journals
BUT:
It doesn’t specifically deal with OA articles and hybrid journals.
Involves:
• Embargo periods (start-date, end-date)
• Free issues (marketing)
• Licenses different to CC
• Subscription as the main publishing model
• etc…

42. 42
OA articles and Hybrid journals
TO USE DC AND CC METADATA ELEMENTS
High uptake is achieved when publishers are asked to use elements
that they are already familiar with.
PRISM
Module
Our Approach

43. Licences
We observed a widespread uptake of Creative
Commons (CC) to license OA articles.
43
OA articles and Hybrid journals
Practically ALL publishers are using
CC for their OA articles

44. Copyright
For OA articles published in Hybrid journals
we observed that:
44
OA articles and Hybrid journals
• Most of the publishers allow
authors to retain the copyright
but
• some publishers are asking
authors to assign the copyright
to the publisher.

45. Our Proposal
• In Sept 2013, the EPSRC (Engineering and
Physical Sciences Research Council) awarded
JournalTOCs funding to:
Prototype a solution to facilitate the automated
discovery of OA articles from hybrid journals
• The JEMO Project was setup to implement the
prototype.
• JEMO blog at http://openjemo.wordpress.com/about
45
OA articles and Hybrid journals

46. The main JEMO’s objective is:
To help publishers implement
standard elements in their RSS
feeds to enable the systematic
identification of Open Access (OA)
articles from hybrid journals
which will consequently help
researchers.
46
OA articles and Hybrid journals
Our Proposal

47. 47
OA articles and Hybrid journals
Our Proposal
“To help publishers ....”

48. “… standard elements in their
RSS feeds ….”
48
OA articles and Hybrid journals
Our Proposal
<dc:rights>
<cc:license>

49. “…. systematic identification ”
49
OA articles and Hybrid journals
Our Proposal
Aggregators
Discovery services
Abstract & Indexing DB
Publishers

50. Prototyping
50
1. We prepared a Step by Step Guide to enable
OA identification from RSS feeds
<dc:rights> <cc:license>
How to add
and to
RSS
http://openjemo.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/step-by-step-guide-to-enable-
oa-identification-from-rss-feeds/
Prototyping a Solution

51. Prototyping
51
2. We worked with a group of publishers to help
them to implement the guidelines
12+4 participating publishers:
• 5 as initial JEMO Project Partners
• 7 were contacted after the project started
+ 4 OA self-motivated publishers
Prototyping a Solution

52. Participating Publishers
52
JEMO
JEMO
JEMO
JEMO
JEMO
Prototyping a Solution

53. 53
Participating Publishers
Prototyping a Solution
These publishers have also agreed to implement, or are already using
the suggested dc:rights and cc:license metadata elements

54. OA systematic identification
54
Prototyping a Solution
3. On 7th April 2014, JournalTOCs started the
systematic identification of OA from hybrid
journals from the participating publishers.
…. ….
JournalTOCs
Aggregator
RSS feeds from publishers

55. 55
Prototyping a Solution
1. Copyright Analysis (if dc:rights is present)
<dc:rights>Copyright © 2014 [ENTITY]</dc:rights>
JournalTOCs
Aggregator
OA systematic identification
ENTITY=Author
YES
© Author
© Publisher
NO

56. 56
Prototyping a Solution
2. Licence Analysis
(if cc:license has a no-empty value for rdf:resource)
<cc:license rdf:resource=”[Selected_CC_License]“/>
JournalTOCs
Aggregator
OA systematic identification
rdf.resource != ‘’ YES
OA article
Non OA article
NO
Axiom: Only OA articles have CC rdf:resource values

57. 57
JournalTOCs
Aggregator
OA systematic identification
Prototyping a Solution

58. 58
Showing OA articles
on JournalTOCs
Prototyping a Solution

59. Automated identification of OA articles
from hybrid journals: Demonstration
59
http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/index.php?action=search&query=1740-0597 Demo
Demo

60. Demonstration 2
Demo screenshot
60
Demo
Demo

61. Demonstration 2
Demo screenshot
61
Demo
Select IUCr
Demo

62. Demonstration 2
Demo screenshot
62
Demo
Notice the open access and
hybrid journals
Demo

63. Demonstration 2
Demo screenshot
63
Demo
Notice the open access and
hybrid journals
Demo

64. Demonstration 2
Demo screenshot
64
Demo
Notice the open access and
hybrid journals
IUCr
Demo

65. 65
Showing OA articles
on JournalTOCs
Demo

66. Conclusions
The context:
• Adding CC to RSS was a “natural” process for the
participating publishers as all of them are already
using CC licenses for OA articles
• Because 60% of publishers are already using DC
elements, adding dc:rights was easily done
• Since the start of the project, 16 publishers have
implemented the dc:rights and cc:license
elements in their RSS feeds
66
Final Thoughts

67. Conclusions
The benefits:
• OA articles in hybrid journals are no longer ‘hidden’
 more views and click-throughs
• Better return on investment for Article Processing
Charge (APC)
• Discovery of OA at the article level has been made
possible
67
Final Thoughts

68. Further Work
Clustering
We are developing subject clusters of always-full-
text-available articles by topic, irrespective of
source (OA journals, or OA articles within hybrid, plus
subscription-only journals)
68
Further Work

69. Subject Clusters of OA Articles
• End result in both instances - guaranteed full-text
available subject-based clusters of the latest
articles
• OA articles in hybrid journals are no longer 'hidden'.
More views and click-throughs
• Better return on investment for Article Processing
Charge (APC)
• Better access to articles on topics of interest
69
Further Work

70. Further Work
Clustering
We are developing subject clusters of always-full-
text-available articles by topic, irrespective of source
(OA journals, or OA articles within hybrid, plus
subscription-only journals.)
JournalTOCS will produce, display and allow alerting of
subject clusters of new articles from 24,000+ journals.
For JournalTOCS Premium institutional subscribers,
subject clusters will also include articles from subscribed
titles.
70
Further Work

71. Further Work
CC Type Identification
We will alert readers the type of CC licence used by
each OA article.
71
Further Work

72. 30
40
Further Work
Increase Uptake
We are forming a second batch of 10 publishers to
which we will help to implement the DC Rights and CC
licence metadata elements.
72
Further Work
Dec 2014Apr 2014
10
20

73. Further Work
Analytic Information
We will produce metrics and information on the
evolution of the number of OA articles published in
hybrid journals per period of times and per subjects.
73
Further Work

74. Review
This presentation has:
• Outlined a challenge which has been observed:
OA articles hidden in hybrid journals
• Proposed a light-weight solution based on mature
and widely-used standards: RSS & CC
• Showed development of services which have used
RSS
• Proposed a solution based on RSS and CC
• Illustrated an example of a service which uses the
solution
74

75. Questions
Any questions?
75
For further information on this talk please contact
Santiago Chumbe (S.Chumbe@hw.ac.uk),
Roddy MacLeod (macleod.roddy@gmail.com) or
Brian Kelly (ukwebfocus@gmail.com)