Article Level Metadata

This article is on, specifically, open access metadata, which the author rightly points out is needed to help readers actually locate and use open access articles.

While there are an increasing number of OA articles in these hybrid titles, there is no standard way to represent to readers, or to discovery systems, that an article is freely available outside of a subscription wall. In most cases, discovery and link-resolution systems describe access terms only at the journal level, so OA papers that are published in hybrid journals might not be made visible to patrons because of the systems’ presumption about access. If a searcher does not specify they would like to include all indexed articles, all of the content contained within a subscription-based journal title that the institution does not have access to will likely be excluded from search results. If a user does specify they want a broader “all-content” search and is provided with an OA article as a result option, often the only way to determine if an article is freely accessible is to attempt to gain access and await the appearance or absence of a paywall.

I recently had an issue with metadata as well. I wanted to do a statistical comparison of the openness of articles funded by different sources. (The NIH, for example, mandates that all funded studies be publicly accessible. I wanted to look at everyone else.) In addition to the difficulty located OA metadata, there was no way to look up funding sources. It’s not in the metadata or abstracts of PubMed, at least - and it wasn’t even in some of the full articles I looked at.

Meta-level data about articles - whether it’s open access, who has funded it, etc - need to be provided, otherwise it will be much harder to do the critical work we need to in reflecting on our own fields and practices.

This also gets at the issue of discoverability. We live in a time of abundant information. Some estimate that over 50,000,000 scientific articles exist, with a new one being added to the databases every minute. We cannot read everything. We cannot consider reading everything. We need to have ways of finding what we’re looking for that are us effective and unbiased as possible.