[open-humanities] finding and searching OA humanities journals

Sat Aug 6 08:42:28 UTC 2011

Hi all,

> My feeling is a major problem is that OA material can be published in
> many different ways, for example through self-archiving, archiving
> through an institution or through a journal.

I guess far the most repositories and open access journals are using the 
OAI PMH to offer document metadata for harvesting. So it would be very 
useful to use an OAI harvester to collect this metadata. Inho 
unfortunately the metadata quality is not that good  - but at least OAI 
works quite well.

> These might require
> different ways of aggregation, and different ways of searching.
  I totally agree with you.

> At any
> rate, anything OA makes the text available, which means it can be scraped.
As John mentioned there are many ways of publishing open access content. 
And that also means there is a confusing mixture and diversity of terms 
of use. Some open access journals are using creative commons licences, 
but I guess the majority of them does not use CC licences that are 
compliant to the open definition. Not to forget, that a large amount of 
OA journals does not use any CC licence, which also means that the 
documents published in these journals can only by used according to 
copyright restrictions. The case with repositories is even worse, often 
the authors transferred all their rights exclusively to the journal or 
publishing house and they are only allowed to deposit their articles on 
a repository due to publishers goodwill.  I do not want be too 
pessimistic, but I am not quite sure if "scraping" (as I understand the 
term) is allowed for all the content, that is available under open 
access conditions. So it might be more transparent to collect the 
metadata with an oai harvester, offer it via an search interface that 
also displays under what sort of licence the content is available and 
how it can be used.

best regards

Uli

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Ulrich Herb
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