Springer Open Choice Agreement
In February 2008, Springer and MPG reached an agreement which includes Open Choice, Springer's open access scheme, for all researchers affiliated with a Max Planck Institute publishing in Springer's journals. This agreement is part of the Open Access Publishing strategy applied by the MPG.
During the period of the contract, Springer and the MPG will evaluate the effects of open access on both authors and users. Following concrete goals have been defined for the course of the project:
- Increase the visibility and distribution of articles published under the Open Choice conditions
- Improve article coverage on the MPG eDoc server
- Develop requirements for projected agreements and generic usage scenarios for data transfer
- Provide measures for statistics and monitoring
Workflow: Springer Open Choice to MPG[edit]
Within the course of the project, a workflow should be defined which enable an efficient way to transfer the articles and full texts published under the Open Choice conditions to the MPG eDoc server.
Springer's AuthorMapper[edit]
Springer's AuthorMapper is an visualization of articles published on the SpringerLink platform. The tool enables document discovery based on author locations and provides various options to define a relevant set of articles, e.g. by specifying the author affiliation or by restricting the selection to Open Access articles only (see OA sub set).
Unfortunately, this tool doesn't seem to be an appropriate resource to identify all OA articles published by an author from MPG because...
- there is no mean to create an union of more than one affiliation (e.g. by defining a logical "OR" or by truncating the search term).
- year of publication may differ essentially from year of submission, see http://www.springerlink.com/content/v516407528108321/
Example search string to select all articles published in the Max Planck Society provided by the IVSen.
Improving the visibility of Open Choice articles[edit]
... via CrossRef[edit]
From our point of view, improving the visibility of OA materials is very crucial for the success of Springers open access business model - and we believe that CrossRef could play an important role in distributing the access information. In the meantime we contacted CrossRef to inquire if CrossRef has considered to include access information (e.g. an OA tag) in its metadata records to distribute open access information for link resolving systems.
CrossRef answered that they have indeed and they proposed two ways to make OA information available for CrossRef: the first possibility would be first choice for the short way: Publishers would have to include an "Open Access" designation in the metadata when they register the DOI with CrossRef and then this would be available. A better way on the long run might be to tie it in with the CrossMark project CrossRef is working on. With CrossMark publishers would embed metadata in an article (HTML and PDF versions) and the metadata could inlcude an OA status designation. This would enable search engines to pick up the information. CrossRef is hoping to have a prototype of CrossMark within in the next few months.
Our request at Springer would be to realize the first option as soon as possible and to check on the long run if the Springer Metadata would be sufficient for the requirements of the CrossMark project.
... via OAI-PMH interface[edit]
We suggested the setup of an Springer Open Choice OAI repository to improve the visibility of articles published under the OC model (comparable to PMC Open Archives Service). This would enable Service Providers like OAIster or BASE to include all OC articles in these search engines. Auf diesem Repository könnten dann für die am Open Choice Programm beteiligten Institutionen entsprechende "Sets" eingerichtet werden, um auch einen selektiven Download zu ermöglichen.
Reply: In autumn 2008 we will start to work on a project on OAI protocol so that this delivery feature is not available at the moment. Delivery via DDS (Data Delivery System) will be made via ftp uploads to our ftp site ftp.springer-dds.com for you to download the data.