Add Journal Read and Publish Details to Alma and Make Them Discoverable in Primo
As libraries continue to add more read and publish journal agreements, it’s important that researchers are able to easily discover which journals are part of these agreements, the open access article publishing charges that are and are not covered by these agreements, and other relevant details related to open access publishing from the library’s read and publish agreements.
There are several open access journal discovery products that provide end users with this kind of information, but they must perform searches on separate platforms, and library staff must maintain these holdings outside of Alma.
Examples include:
ChronosHub: https://stanford.chronoshub.io/?q=%220021-9371%22&journaltitle=Journal%20of%20British%20Studies
Open Journal Finder by Consortia Manager:
The above products use data from a variety of sources, such as publishers, OpenAlex, etc., to gather journal APC costs, publishing activity at the library’s university, and more. Libraries can add notes about their read and publish agreements that display in the corresponding journal records. And journals whose APCs are included in a library’s read and publish agreements prominently indicate that there are no costs for researchers to publish open access articles.
This would need to be a cross-product enhancement involving Primo for end user discovery, Alma for electronic resources management and licensing aspects of transformative agreements, Alma Analytics for tracking publishing usage of these agreements and combining it with COUNTER read data, and content operations for the metadata for APC costs, institutional publishing activity, etc.
As in the examples above, some read and publish/APC metadata will appear in brief search results (e.g., whether the APC is covered by the library agreement). At the same time, more details would be available in full journal records (such as Creative Commons licenses, a publisher description of the journal’s scope so authors can determine relevant journals for their research, unique details about the read and publish agreements that the library can customize from within Alma, publishing activity in that journal at that institution, open access publishing instructions for authors (customizable by library), etc.. Researchers would need to be able to use facets to limit their search results to journals whose APCs are covered by their library’s read and publish agreements.
Use Cases:
Researchers wanting to find open access journals without any author fees could search Primo using limiters for journals included in their library’s read and publish agreements and subject areas.
Libraries could achieve a greater return on investment from their read and publish agreements by making their offerings more visible at the point of need. The information would be easy for researchers to understand, reducing the need for library staff to respond to questions about eligible journals and OA author publishing costs.
Researchers would not need to search a third-party platform; they could simply use Primo to find this information, a tool they are already familiar with.
Library staff would not need to maintain read and publish holdings in a separate system; they would be managed in Alma alongside the library’s other electronic resources.
Library staff could run Analytics reports on their researchers’ utilization of the publishing parts of read and publish agreements to more easily assess their return on investment and inform renewal decisions.
Justification
Libraries are investing more and more of their acquisitions budgets in read and publish journal agreements, and researchers need the ability to easily discover these details via Primo searches. Providing details about whether or not researchers need to pay to publish open access articles helps researchers make informed decisions on where to publish and better comply with government open access mandates across the world. It could also help libraries achieve a greater return on investment from these agreements and more easily assess them to make data-informed renewal decisions.
Charlie Remy
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