March 5: Part 1: The Infrastructure of Open Access: Knowing What is Open - National Information Standards Organization

"Open Access (OA) has become a widely accepted and rapidly growing method of publishing scholarly content. As OA distribution gains traction, a high priority for the community is establishing and building the infrastructure needed to efficiently manage this content. This infrastructure includes such elements as OA publication charge management by third parties, fee structures and payments, visual and machine-readable identification of OA availability and reuse rights, and discovery layer functions. In 2013, NISO launched a project on Open Access Metadata to develop recommendations for the availability and reuse rights issues, but that addresses only a piece of the total infrastructure issue. In the first part of NISO’s two-part series, the focus is on Knowing What is Open. When content is published by a strictly Open Access publisher or in a completely open access online journal, knowing what is freely available to read by the user can be fairly obvious. This is less clear for hybrid titles, where open access is set at an article-by-article level. Even when a journal is fully open access, mechanisms are necessary for conveying the OA status of articles and their reuse rights to other systems, such as discovery platforms. This webinar will  discuss just what it means to say content is 'open access,' what the various flavors of OA are,and how people and other systems can determine how open something is and both discover and access such content. Issues around license rights, the scale of openness, and the application of this data in discovery contexts will also be covered."