Hi Lin

We have struggled with this off and on as well. Here are few things we are doing. There might be room for some divide and conquer here!

- We removed the open Access label from Summon. We found it was popping up too many times in error so we had to remove it until the meta data from the open lists improved.

- We recently disabled a journal title in one of the larger open lists – ROAD b/c it was deemed predatory.

We are going to go through the Open lists we have enabled at a high level to see what their policies are. It’s impossible to go title by title as there just are too many.

Doing this as a group might be a good way to nail those open lists in one swoop rather than us all doing this individually? And this way it isn’t just for Summon users – I’m sure the other discovery layers likely offer the same access? Just a thought and if anyone is interested, maybe we could chat about it at our next meeting?

From: Bcoel <bcoel-bounces@lists.bccampus.ca> On Behalf Of Lin Brander
Sent: March 7, 2022 4:09 PM
To: bcoel@lists.bccampus.ca
Subject: [Bcoel] open content in federated search

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Hello Everyone,

I have a question.

We are wondering about adding open content to Summon. If we do this, it would be a lot of content and would appear as part of the library collection. I have concerns about this for two reasons:

- The result list might be overwhelming, is of varying quality, and may prevent the paid content in the catalogue, which is specific to the curriculum, from displaying in a way that students can find it.

- Some of the offered paid content is from publishers like Elsevier and, even though we pay for some Elsevier content, I have deep reservations about ‘open’ collections from for-profit publishers.

We do have the option to hand-pick some of the open collections on offer. What has your Library done about adding open content to your collections?

Thanks for your help,

Lin