The open access needle in the discovery haystack | Jisc

"The transition towards making scholarly communication openly available and accessible for all is a high priority for funding organisations. A tremendous amount of work is underway by libraries to disclose new sets of data to ensure that their collections can be searched and found.

Supporting this trend, Jisc has recently launched the library hub discover offering a fast and convenient way to search for publications held by UK libraries....

There is good news, however! A lot of different people and organisations around the world are focused on finding ways forward....

In addition to all the work that Jisc has done, the OAPEN initiative has been active for some years and the Knowledge Exchange has undertaken surveys and released reports. The British Library is leading on work and, more recently, the COPIM project has received a substantial amount of funding to pursue solutions in this space....

As part of the Jisc library hub roadmap, we have plans to build and release a tool that will help smaller libraries and open access publishers to more easily create good quality bibliographic records that will be optimised for visibility in discovery systems...."

The amount of data brought together by this service is growing daily, but at the time of writing, 135 academic and specialist libraries have contributed, adding up to more than 102 million catalogue records. But here’s the rub: among those 102 million records, it’s not easy to find out which electronic books under which topic are free, unrestricted and legally accessibly. ..."