Help Wanted: Supplier Services and Sustainable Funding Incentives for OA Monographs By Rachel Fox Von Swearingen (Collections Lead Librarian, Syracuse University Libraries) <rsfoxvon@syr.edu>
P
ublishers, vendors, and libraries exist in a commercial ecosystem of mutual benefit. From the library perspective, publishers create information products, vendors make library workflows scalable, and libraries provide significant funding. Robust vendor services from both publishers and suppliers have adapted to simultaneously serve both print and paywalled electronic monograph collection development. A monograph is a monograph, no matter how (or whether) a library pays for it, and our collection development evaluation process and metadata supply needs do not change for an open access title. However, the tumultuous rearrangement of the funding ecosystem to accommodate open access (OA) monographs has affected the services provided to us by our vendor partners. As a result, libraries are experiencing significant service gaps and a proliferation of disparate sales models, impeding our ability to collect titles and sustainably participate monetarily in the ecosystem. These struggles from the library side are a labor supply issue. Library staff lines have slowly been transitioned from collections and technical services to other services like digital scholarship, research impact support, and digital preservation due to changes in the collecting landscape and outsourcing to vendor services. OA monograph collecting is not currently serviced well through our vendors, but it is difficult to craft an administratively justifiable proposal to transition library staff lines back to fill a gap previously met by vendors. Libraries are partners with other members of the open access publishing ecosystem, and we can understand why the gaps exist, but libraries unfortunately cannot simply move to fill those gaps with our own labor. Collecting OA monographs requires manual workflows, and those are still in flux and development at my institution. Understanding “push” and “pull” when it comes to the labor involved is important. For example, detailed approval plans, standing orders, and notification services push title discovery our way with relatively low labor on the library end once everything is set up. Our technical staff then load a tidy batch of precurated and precleaned final records into our catalog. Outside of that, we monitor news, email, and websites for discovery and pull titles and catalog metadata to us. Our subject selectors do have some monograph types for which we utilize the title-by-title pull method, such as maps, music scores, video titles, or art publications. If a library pulls records from an open metadata repository, they must still have the in-house expertise to query the API and then clean the records before loading. This pull workflow at the scale we are headed toward for OA monographs is not possible. Our first early steps for collecting OA monographs have relied on our existing monograph workflows for title requests. Then, those individual title requests become package selections where we acquire metadata from our electronic resource management system (ERM) services, which are powered by a knowledge base. Historically, if a requested title isn’t in our ERM, we have not added it. Title requests to date have been from a few history faculty, from our subject librarians, and a few I have selected.
20 Against the Grain / July 2022 Special Report
Our faculty cited their desire for their students to encounter all course readings side-by-side with their pay walled counterparts within library systems. Because package-level or publisher-level collecting falls into the duties of interdisciplinary collection development librarians like me, our subject selectors have not been able to dedicate the time to regularly collect OA titles for their individual subject areas. The titles don’t appear within our supplier workflows, nor within their subject-specific discovery sources, so relying on their labor isn’t a viable solution.
“The potential for growth of a centralized OA monograph metadata repository is fantastic ... It does not, however, address the library need for vendor services like approval or notification profiles ... nor does it address the library labor needed to develop scripts to harvest from the repository API.”
Package-level discovery, and incorporating its metadata into our systems, typically occurs in our ERM. ERMs are not designed for collection development discovery, so this already disadvantages OA content. Cambridge University librarians Jayne Kelly and Clara Panozzo (2021) review many of the difficulties they have encountered with this process in their Open Access Books Network blog post “Open Access books and [in]discoverability: a library perspective.” They describe vendor degradation of publishersupplied metadata, duplication among collections, unclear OA or paywalled status, disjointed workflows to accommodate dozens of different publisher pulling cycles, broken links, and other gaps. Some publishers I have spoken to weren’t aware of ERMs and focused only on providing MARC records directly to libraries. Others do not submit records out of adherence to the open philosophy of not working with a for-fee vendor. If a publisher does submit metadata, the ERM vendor does not always accept it, and the reasons vary from lack of perception of library demand for the collection or inadequacies in the data itself. I have had discussions with several of my publisher sales representative colleagues on how we can get the metadata for their package into the knowledge base, and it is a very long and uncertain process. Librarians from the Council of California Community Colleges (McMillan and Flores 2021) shared their experiences researching their ERM’s process for identifying and including OA metadata collections. In their blog post “Open Access Collections in the Ex Libris Central Discovery Index,” they outline their ambitious project to curate a list of trusted OA collections that other libraries could activate within their own ERMs, and some of the under-the-hood details provided by Ex Libris. For OA monographs, and overall, we need for ERM vendors to be incentivized to participate more actively in the OA ecosystem as well.
<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>
