NASIG 2014

An important current challenge for research information providers is ensuring the automated discovery of Open Access (OA) content in hybrid journals [1, 2, 3]. Until now there has been no discovery service able to systematically identify the crucially important free full-text availability of OA articles regardless of where and how such articles have been published (i.e. in fully Open Access journals and hybrid journals [4,5,6]. The urgent solution to this challenge has been recognised through the creation of various initiatives and task forces initiated by national and worldwide institutions [7, 8 , 9]. A solution is important because hybrid journals are proliferating. Nearly all of the major publishers now provide such journals in order to take advantage of recent changes in research funder requirements, and to be competitive in the new OA business model. By working with a sample of eight important publishers and by using standard elements that are in agreement with the task force instigated by NISO to resolve this issue in a standardised manner, we have prototyped a new systematic identification of that essential information by embedding article-level OA metadata in Table of Content (TOC) RSS feeds. Our research has found that this is an efficient method for enabling M2M discovery of OA content. In this work we present the initial results obtained, the impact produced by our proposal in the systematic discoverability of OA content from those eight publishers' hybrid journals, and a demonstration of subject clustering of aggregated OA articles within a freely available journal current awareness service - JournalTOCs.