The voting members of the US' National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved a new project to develop standardised bibliographic metadata and visual indicators to describe the accessibility of journal articles with respect to how 'open' they are.
It has been observed that many offerings are available from publishers under the banner of Open Access (OA), Increased Access, Public Access, or other names; the terms offered vary both between publishers and within publishers by journal, and in some cases, based on the funding organisation of the author. Adding to the potential confusion, a number of publishers also offer hybrid options in which some articles are 'open' while the rest of the journal's content are available only by subscription or licence.
It is said that no standardised bibliographic metadata currently provides information on whether a specific article is openly accessible and what re-use rights might be available to readers. Visual indicators or icons indicating the openness of an article are inconsistent in both design and use across publishers or even across journals from the same publisher.
The project launched by NISO will focus initially on metadata elements that describe the readership rights associated with an OA article. Specifically, the NISO Working Group will determine the optimal mechanisms to describe and transmit the rights, if any, an arbitrary user has to access a specific article from any internet connection point. Recommendations will include a means for distribution and aggregation of this metadata in machine-readable form. The group will also consider the feasibility of incorporating information on re-use rights and the feasibility of reaching agreement on transmission of that data.
This new project will be discussed in NISO's Open Teleconference call on February 11.
