The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the publication of a special themed issue of Information Standards Quarterly (ISQ) on the topic of Open Access Infrastructure. As Guest Content Editor, Liam Earney, Head of Library Support Services, Jisc, notes that 2013 seemed to have been a watershed for open access (OA). Driven by a number of policy announcements from funding bodies and governments worldwide, the question is no longer whether open access will or should happen, but rather how will it be implemented in a sustainable way. Earney has gathered in this issue of ISQ a wealth of insights from a wide variety of viewpoints—publishers, funders, universities, intermediaries, standards bodies, and open access experts on where we are and where we are going with a sustainable OA infrastructure.
In the feature article, ISQ Managing Editor Cynthia Hodgson highlights, through a series of interviews with experts in the OA arena, some of the major areas of infrastructure that are needed, including institutional policies, compliance tracking and reporting, publishing tools, new economic models and licensing, and sustainability. A glossary of key OA terms used throughout the issue is included.
The In Practice section describes the OA experiences of both a library and a publisher. Martin Moyle, Catherine Sharp, and Alan Bracey (University College London) describe the research library's perspective in The Role of Standards in the Management of Open Access Research Publications. The UCL Library is responsible for both the green OA repository and the management of gold OA publications within its institution. David Ross (SAGE Publishing) in A Publisher's Perspective on the Challenges of Open Access describes the experiences of SAGE in responding to "this evolving, competitive landscape." SAGE publishes on behalf of almost 300 learned societies, associations, and institutes and in 2013 "adopted one of the most liberal policies with regard to the authors accepted manuscript (AAM), allowing authors to post this in an institutional repository or their personal website immediately, with no embargo."
Two recent and important project initiatives in this space were launched in 2013: the SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE) by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU); and the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States (CHORUS), a cooperative effort involving publishers, funding agencies, technology and resource partners, and other organizations involved in scholarly publishing for the public benefit. In The Need for Research Data Inventories and the Vision for SHARE, Clifford Lynch describes the potential role of SHARE in the overall scheme of managing research data. "Most fundamentally, SHARE functions as an inventory of research data that is produced by scholars within the higher education community." Alice Meadows and Howard Ratner explain how CHORUS Helps Drive Public Access. "CHORUS supports public access to federally funded research by acting as an information bridge, linking the public to freely accessible journal articles directly on publisher platforms, where the articles can be read and preserved in their scholarly context."
Cameron Neylon, Ed Pentz, and Greg Tananbaum, the Co-chairs of NISO's Access and Licensing Indicators Working Group provide a preview of the forthcoming recommended practice on Standardized Metadata Elements to Identify Access and License Information. The goal of the project was to identify a set of metadata elements to describe both the accessibility of a specific article and the available reuse rights.
ISQ is available in open access in electronic format on the NISO website. Both the entire issue on Open Access Infrastructure and the individual articles may be freely downloaded. Print copies of ISQ are available by subscription and as print on demand.
