Universities are attempting to ensure that all of their research is publicly accessible because of funding mandates. Many universities have established campus open access (OA) repositories but are struggling with how to upload millions of manuscripts under numerous license agreements while also linking metadata to make them discoverable. To do this manually requires around 15 minutes per manuscript from an experienced librarian. The time and cost to do this campus-wide is prohibitive. To radically reduce the time and costs of this process and to harvest all past work, this article reports on the development and testing of a free and open source (FOSS) JavaScript-based application, aperta-accessum, which does the following: 1) harvests names and emails from a department’s faculty webpage; 2) identifies scholars’ Open Researcher and Contributor IDentifiers (ORCID iDs); 3) obtains digital object identifiers (DOIs) of publications for each scholar; 4) checks for existing copies in an institution’s OA repository; 5) identifies the legal opportunities to provide OA versions of all of the articles not already in the OA repository; 6) sends authors emails requesting a simple upload of author manuscripts; and 7) adds link-harvested metadata from DOIs with uploaded preprints into a bepress repository; the code can be modified for additional repositories. The results of this study show that, in the administrative time needed to make a single document OA manually, aperta-accessum can process approximately five entire departments worth of peer-reviewed articles. Following best practices discussed, it is clear that this open-source OA harvester enables institutional library’s stewardship of OA knowledge on a mass scale for radically reduced costs.
- Source code https://osf.io/7mecz/
Keywords[edit | edit source]
data management knowledge, data management practices, open access harvesting, open source software, data management, metadata, Automation, knowledge, data management practices, free software, knowledge mobilization, Open Source, communication studies, communication, information technology, information science, libraries
See also[edit | edit source]
- The Rise of Platinum Open Access Journals with both Impact Factors and Zero Article Processing Charges
- From Open Access to Open Science: The Path From Scientific Reality to Open Scientific Communication
- Professors Want to Share: Preliminary Survey Results on Establishing Open Source Endowed Professorships
- Canadian professors' views on establishing open source endowed professorships
- Sponsored Libre Research Agreements to Create Free and Open Source Software and Hardware
- Towards open source patents: Semi-automated open hardware certification from MediaWiki websites
- Open Source Database and Website to Provide Free and Open Access to Inactive U.S. Patents in the Public Domain
- A Case for Weakening Patent Rights
- Open-source 3-D printing materials database generator
- Patent Parasites: Non-Inventors Patenting Existing Open-Source Inventions in the 3-D Printing Technology Space