Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
journal articles and institutional repositories have become instantly
traceable. Many article citations now come from the author complete
with a DOI, something that was brought to many researchers'
attention when DOIs were required by the 2008 UK Research
Assessment Exercise (RAE).
13
However, an issue with DOIs is that, despite many publishers' listing
an article as having a DOI, not all of them are actually registered at
CrossRef, which can lead to frustration. Essentially, if the item cannot
be found in CrossRef, the article becomes harder to retrieve. In addition,
the DOI will typically link to the publisher's site, which does not
guarantee access at the point of use. For example, if the library has a
subscription to the article via an intermediary, then the DOI will be of
no use for resource discovery; this is known as the appropriate copy
problem (Beit-Arie et al., 2001).
OpenURL
An OpenURL enables the transfer of metadata about an item (a journal
article or book, for example) from a resource, where a citation is
discovered (for example, an Abstracting & Indexing (A&I) database), to
a link resolver. By providing a means to tell another system
what
something is, rather than
where
it is located on the internet (the function
of a normal URL), OpenURLs provide a means for link resolvers to take
charge of directing users at particular institutions or organisations to
appropriate, subscribed resources for the content, be they in electronic
or print form.
(Culling, 2007)
Originally developed as part of a research project by Herbert Van de
Sompel and Patrick Hochstenbach at Ghent University (Van de Sompel,
Hochstenbach and Beit-Arie, 2000), the OpenURL is now an NISO
Standard (NISO, 2004); however, Culling, in his 2007 report (Culling,
2007) to the UKSG,
14
which explored the data supply chain that has
developed in recent years to facilitate the creation of link resolver
knowledge bases, identified a number of issues and barriers such as:
lack of understanding and close co-operation by stakeholders
a significant number of stakeholders that do not make their
