Tracking transformative agreements through open metadata: method and validation using Dutch Research Council NWO funded papers

Transformative agreements have become an important strategy in the transition to open access, with almost 1,200 such agreements registered by 2025. Despite their prevalence, these agreements suffer from important transparency limitations, most notably article-level metadata indicating which articles are covered by these agreements. Typically, this data is available to libraries but not openly shared, making it difficult to study the impact of these agreements. In this paper, we present a novel, open, replicable method for analyzing transformative agreements using open metadata, specifically the Journal Checker tool provided by cOAlition S and OpenAlex. To demonstrate its potential, we apply our approach to a subset of publications funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and its health research counterpart ZonMw. In addition, the results of this open method are compared with the actual publisher data reported to the Dutch university library consortium UKB. This validation shows that this open method accurately identified 89% of the publications covered by transformative agreements, while the 11% false positives shed an interesting light on the limitations of this method. In the absence of hard, openly available article-level data on transformative agreements, we provide researchers and institutions with a powerful tool to critically track and evaluate the impact of these agreements.

The purpose of this article is to explore options to further open access in the Netherlands from 2021. Its premise is that there is a need to look at the qualitative aspects of open access, alongside quantitative ones. The article first takes stock of progress that has been made. Next, we suggest broadening the agenda by involving more types of actors and other scholarly formats (like books, chapters, proceedings, preprints and textbooks). At the same time we suggest deepening the open access agenda by including several open access dimensions: immediacy, diamond open access, open metadata, open peer review and open licences. To facilitate discussion, a framework is proposed that allows specifying these actions by the a) aspects of open access they address (what is made open access, how, when and where it is made open access, and copyright and rights retention), b) the actors that play a role (government, research institutions, funders) and c) the various levels at which these actions can be taken: state as goal, set as policy, legalize and promote, recognize and reward, finance, support with infrastructure. A template is provided to ease the use of the framework.

Since its launch in 2019, the Research Organization Registry (ROR) has seen tremendous support from key players in the scholarly communication system, and the past year has seen a particular increase in adoption of ROR. Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID now all support ROR identifiers in their metadata schemas, and many open access publishers and data repositories are using ROR to exchange organizational affiliation information across systems. This poster will give a brief introduction to ROR and feature some notable uses of the ROR ID in order to show what is possible when systems track and share consistent organizational identifiers as open metadata in the teeming ecosystem of scholarly information. Crossref has articulated its ideal scholarly communication system in its aspirational vision of the Research Nexus, which it imagines as "A rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society." These building blocks of "research organizations, people, things, and actions" must generally be represented by machine-readable persistent identifiers in order to be made visible and useful: ROR IDs identify and disambiguate research organizations just as ORCIDs identify researchers and DOIs identify research outputs ("things") such as articles and datasets. DOIs and ORCIDs are now widely understood to be central to the scholarly communication system, but because ROR is a newer initiative, its value may not be as clearly understood. Only recently has ROR begun to be visible in the scholarly landscape, especially but not only in open access and open data projects. For instance, The Open Access Monitor <https://open-access-monitor.de>, a project to improve data about open access in Germany, uses ROR IDs to describe and manage organizations, which allows a user to get very rich data about the open access status of publications issued by researchers affiliated with a particular German research organization (e.g., the Max Planck Institute). OpenAlex <https://openalex.org>, a fully open catalog of the global research system, also uses ROR IDs to track author affiliation information: 94% of the 109,000 institutions in OpenAlex have a ROR ID. The Dryad data repository <https://datadryad.org> asks for institutional affiliation when a user submits a dataset and uses ROR to generate an institutional browse feature in its interface. As we try to improve the system of scholarly communication, we need to remember that research organizations should not be represented by inconsistent text strings or closed identifiers. We can ask and answer more interesting questions of the scholarly record when we can trust its organizational information.

Stevan Harnad, Open Access Book-Impact and "Demotic" Metrics, <em> Open Access Archivangelism </em> , October 10, 2008. <strong> Comment </strong> . I support OA metadata for all non-OA literature and the development of book metrics from open metadata. But I depart from Stevan on one premise: he says that OA for full-text books cannot be mandated, but I think it can.

We present work undertaken at our institutional repository to enhance metadata and re-organize digital objects according to new information architecture, in an effort to minimize administrative object management and processing, and improve object discovery and use. This work was partly motivated by the launch of a new discovery platform at our institution, which aggregates metadata and full text from our four open access repositories into a cohesive, consistent, and enhanced searching and browsing experience. The platform provides digital object identifier (DOI) assignment, metadata access via various formats, and an open metadata and full text application program interface (API) for researchers, amongst other features. Functionality of these platform features relies heavily on accurate object representation and metadata. This work facilitates and improves the discovery and engagement of the diverse digital objects available from our institution, so they can be used and analyzed in new, flexible, and innovative ways by a myriad of communities and disciplines.

We present work undertaken at our institutional repository to enhance metadata and re-organize digital objects according to new information architecture, in an effort to minimize administrative object management and processing, and improve object discovery and use. This work was partly motivated by the launch of a new discovery platform at our institution, which aggregates metadata and full text from our four open access repositories into a cohesive, consistent, and enhanced searching and browsing experience. The platform provides digital object identifier (DOI) assignment, metadata access via various formats, and an open metadata and full text application program interface (API) for researchers, amongst other features. Functionality of these platform features relies heavily on accurate object representation and metadata. This work facilitates and improves the discovery and engagement of the diverse digital objects available from our institution, so they can be used and analyzed in new, flexible, and innovative ways by a myriad of communities and disciplines.

Bianca Kramer has been scholarly communication/open science librarian at Utrecht University Library for 15 years, and recently moved to an independent consulting/research analyst role as Sesame Open Science, with a focus on open science, open metadata and open infrastructure.

Watch the VIDEO of the presentation.The Way to Open Science contains many components. One of these components would be open repositories based on open source software with free access to researchers. Open access policies are essential, as are open infrastructures and open contents. Repositories can support this openness by offering open licenses, open metadata , the possibility to use open formats and open thesauri. Another principal point is transparency. Open peer review should be possible, and the description of processes should also be transparent. Of course, an open license should provide all data types and metadata as well.It is important to help researchers to make their results visible and accessible and to encourage them to publish in OA-Journals and use repositories for the underlying data. Open Access Policies are supporting these efforts. Open data can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose. In order to do so, Open Licenses are required.Also Metadata are important components of the Way to Open Science. Metadata are data about data which should be free of all restrictions on access, structured and based on standards.Open formats are defined by a published specification and are not restricted in their use. They are mainly used by open-source software. Open Thesauruses are freely accessible for everyone without costs and with a free license.Open Processes should be documented, transparent, repeatable and reusable.An open peer review process is also a step forward to Open Science. Authors and referees are no longer anonymous. The whole process and the decision letters are open.Of course Open licenses allow the reuse of any work or data without any restrictions.The lecture will deal with various aspects of open science and focus on the role of repositories – with all chances and challenges.

Thoth, open metadata and building structural equity: an interview for Open Access Week

One of the disciplines behind the science of science is the study of scientific networks. This work focuses on scientific networks as a social network having different nodes and connections. Nodes can be represented by authors, articles or journals while connections by citation, co-citation or co-authorship. One of the challenges in creating scientific networks is the lack of publicly available comprehensive data set. It limits the variety of analyses on the same set of nodes of different scientific networks. To supplement such analyses we have worked on publicly available citation metadata from Crossref and OpenCitatons. Using this data a workflow is developed to create scientific networks. Analysis of these networks gives insights into academic research and scholarship. Different techniques of social network analysis have been applied in the literature to study these networks. It includes centrality analysis, community detection, and clustering coefficient. We have used metadata of Scientometrics journal, as a case study, to present our workflow. We did a sample run of the proposed workflow to identify prominent authors using centrality analysis. This work is not a bibliometric study of any field rather it presents replicable Python scripts to perform network analysis. With an increase in the popularity of open access and open metadata, we hypothesise that this workflow shall provide an avenue for understanding scientific scholarship in multiple dimensions.

The College and Research Libraries Interest Group held a meeting to discuss open access (OA) discovery and metadata workflows. The meeting included a panel of three speakers. Nettie Lagace, Nationa...

Open Access (OA) to scholarly information has now become a reality. Due to the efforts of OA supporters worldwide now even commercial publishers have started supporting open access to their content through various open access models. Many public institutions like universities and R&D Labs have realized the importance of OA in developing the society in general. As a result, these institutions have come up with OA repositories, archives and libraries. As with any such proliferation of information, OA resources have increased manifold and can easily overwhelm even an experienced user. Also different repositories may use various digital library software, which presents the problem of multifarious search interfaces and features. The solution can be found in the open community of open source software and open standards. The open source metadata harvesting software PKP-OHS and the open protocol for metadata harvesting i.e. OAI-PMH come to the rescue. This chapter discusses how PKP-OHS was implemented as a pilot study at the Central University of Himachal Pradesh (CUHP).

Open Access (OA) to scholarly information has now become a reality. Due to the efforts of OA supporters worldwide now even commercial publishers have started supporting open access to their content through various open access models. Many public institutions like universities and R&D Labs have realized the importance of OA in developing the society in general. As a result, these institutions have come up with OA repositories, archives and libraries. As with any such proliferation of information, OA resources have increased manifold and can easily overwhelm even an experienced user. Also different repositories may use various digital library software, which presents the problem of multifarious search interfaces and features. The solution can be found in the open community of open source software and open standards. The open source metadata harvesting software PKP-OHS and the open protocol for metadata harvesting i.e. OAI-PMH come to the rescue. This chapter discusses how PKP-OHS was implemented as a pilot study at the Central University of Himachal Pradesh (CUHP).

A Review of: Hadad, S., & Aharony, N. (2024). Librarians and academic libraries’ role in promoting open access: What needs to change? College & Research Libraries, 85(4), 464–478. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.85.4.464 Objective – The study aims to explore and examine how Israeli librarians perceive their role and the academic library's role in promoting open access (OA) publishing; identify the barriers, challenges, and difficulties in implementing OA; and determine the factors and needs that are required to promote OA. By examining these aspects, the research aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current state of OA promotion in Israeli academic libraries, the challenges faced by librarians, and the necessary changes and support required to enhance OA adoption in the country's academic institutions. Design – Qualitative design using semi-structured interviews. Setting – University libraries in Israel. Subjects – One representative from each of the ten existing universities in Israel. The ten participants held positions as administrators of the library system at their institution (50%), directors of disciplinary libraries (30%), or directors of information systems in academic libraries of Israeli universities. Among the subjects, 90% were female. In terms of seniority, 60% of respondents had been employed by their institution for over 10 years, while 40% had been less than 10 years in their current positions. Methods – Semi-structured interviews were conducted via Zoom between April and June of 2020. The interviews were based on items from existing surveys on librarians' attitudes towards open access and changes in academic library practices. The authors used thematic analysis to categorize and code the interview responses. This "bottom-up" approach allowed researchers to identify common expressions and recurring themes. The analysis yielded 1,264 statements classified into three main categories with several sub-categories. To ensure reliability, 25% of the statements were analyzed by a second coder, resulting in a Cohen's Kappa of .86 (.8 and above is rated as “almost perfect”). The researchers ensured trustworthiness of data by adhering to four principles: truth-value, applicability, consistency, and neutrality of data. Main Results – The interview data revealed that, in general, librarians see their role as crucial in advising researchers about OA publishing. They view themselves as responsible for implementing changes related to OA after institutional policies are set. The authors identify a myriad of barriers to overcome if OA is going to grow and become a more accepted practice of publishing for Israeli researchers. These barriers include, but are not limited to, lack of budget for OA agreements, lack of cooperation from university management, researchers' unfamiliarity with OA and fears about predatory journals, the influence of journal impact factors, and lack of personnel and training for librarians. In order to overcome these barriers, librarians believe they need clear national and institutional OA policies, as well as cooperation and collaboration between academic institutions on OA initiatives. Librarians also believe that systematic training for library staff in OA publishing is imperative, along with guidance and incentives for researchers to publish in OA journals. The results also yielded qualitative data about librarians’ current involvement in OA, which include participating in OA agreements through library consortia, operating current research information systems (CRIS), promoting institutional policies, and interfacing with university administration on OA issues. The study also revealed that there is a desire among librarians to establish the library as the central body for OA matters within their institutions. Conclusion – Librarians see their role as crucial in promoting open access (OA) publishing, particularly in advising researchers and implementing changes after institutional policies are set. Overall, the study concludes that while librarians see themselves as playing important roles in promoting OA, they face numerous challenges and require additional support and resources to fulfill this role effectively. The research highlights the need for systemic changes at both institutional and national levels to advance OA adoption in Israeli academic institutions.

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