In the cooperative spirit of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), four leading academic content providers - Credo; Gale, a part of Cengage Learning; IEEE; and SAGE - publically disclosed their support for the Open Discovery Initiative (ODI).
In NISO's Open Discovery Initiative: Promoting Transparency in Discovery (RP-19-2014), content providers are encouraged to take specific measures to declare their conformance with ODI's recommended practice for pre-indexed 'web-scale' discovery services, with the goal of increasing open communication and collaboration.
Each organisation has published an ODI Conformance Statement, which articulates their efforts to meet ODI's discovery service indexing recommendations. For example, using ODI's conformance checklists, all four participating content providers make their full-text articles available to all discovery service providers for indexing. These providers state that core metadata for their publications is distributed routinely for indexing and that this data provides 'the content item and additional descriptive content for as much of their content as possible.' In the spirit of transparency, the checklists from these four publishers note any relevant exceptions or gaps in their conformance to the ODI recommended practice.
The four publishers have jointly released a statement in order to support and improve cross-sector collaboration in library discovery. The publishers encourage other publishers and discovery service providers to embrace ODI conformance, as a method for opening up conversations across the industry about discovery service indexing.
These ODI Conformance Statements are linked from the NISO webpage.
