Open Access metadata, Part Two

Silke Davison

Thu 21 Mar 2024

Read this article at hypothèses.org

This blog post was written in collaboration with Jeff Edmunds, Digital Access Coordinator at the Penn State University Libraries. It’s a companion piece to the original blog post, ‘Open Access metadata: OAPEN partners with Penn State University Libraries’ (linked below).  

In October of 2023, OAPEN announced a collaboration with Penn State University Libraries whereby OAPEN’s metadata was being transformed into MARC records, cleaned up and improved, and then made freely available for download (with a CC license assigned) via Penn State’s institutional repository, ScholarSphere. 

Since September 2023, the MARC files have been downloaded hundreds of times (averaging 200-300 times per month) from many parts of the globe. The visualization below demonstrates exactly how far and wide these MARC files have been downloaded. 

Downloads have originated from 40 distinct countries, with the breakdown by continent as follows: 

  • North America: 50.8%
  • Europe: 32.4% 
  • Asia: 12.5% 
  • Oceania: 2% 
  • Africa: 1.8% 
  • South America: 0.5% 

We are delighted to see such a global reach. This shows how the OAPEN Library is truly a global library, committed to fostering a more equitable scholarly communications infrastructure, and what we can achieve when we collaborate with libraries such as Penn State, who are also dedicated to sharing  knowledge and new ideas with the world. The statistics also give us the opportunity to improve our outreach to libraries in areas of the globe that are not taking full advantage of the freely available metadata, beyond those that are covered in the image. 

Now that the MARC records have been available for several months, Penn State has been able to improve its processing thanks to feedback from members of the OAPEN and DOAB Library Working Group, specifically Erik Lindgren (Information Specialist at the Turku University Library, Finland) and Emma Booth (Metadata Manager for Content Management, University of Manchester Library, UK). 

Given the success of this collaboration, OAPEN and Penn State University Libraries are discussing the possibility of implementing a similar process for the metadata available from DOAB for its corpus of nearly 80,000 open access titles. 

The OAPEN MARC files are updated monthly and currently describe over 33,000 open access titles.