Open Access and Technology
Taylor & Francis has been publishing Open Access books since 2013. We have over 800 pieces of Open Access book content available through our Taylor & Francis eBooks platform. Technology is an important aspect to keep in mind when creating Open Access content and making free digital content available to all. The goal of Open Access is to allow content to be easily found, re-used and have world impact. This would not be the case if the content was behind a paywall. For Open Access to be available to all it must be easily discoverable. This plays into ensuring all technology is setup correctly to meet the goal of Open Access. We’ve sat down with our tech team to discuss Open Access and Technology. We’ve learned a lot about the obstacles with Open Access and technology. Here’s what we learned:
The following are key aspects of Open Access and Technology:
Click on the images to read more about each aspect of Open Access & Technology.
Click on the images to read more about each aspect of Open Access & Technology.
It has taken some work in order to allow a book or chapter record to be marked as Open Access in all systems including the Taylor & Francis eBooks platform. Taylor & Francis had to make changes to the Taylor & Francis eBooks platform and other systems to ensure the appropriate licenses and funder information were automatically attached to every Open Access book and chapter in all our systems and displayed properly to users. Open Access has grown enormously and now includes funder mandates and Plan S. Therefore, we needed to create a platform to ensure Open Access is accounted for in all our systems and easy for users to access.
Traditionally when a customer purchases publisher content on a platform, we grant them an entitlement to the content. This can be customized based on the kind of purchase. For instance, for subscriptions, entitlements can expire but for perpetual purchases the customer will always have access.
For Open Access content, we had to find a way to grant everyone access to the content on our platform, not just customers who purchased access. The entitlement access model did not make sense because not everyone who visited the platform would have an account (where we could add the entitlement), and customers expressed a desire to see Open Access content separate from the content they had purchased. So, we had to made changes in the content logic on the platform, as well as search, browse filters, librarian dashboards, etc.
Every Open Access chapter is assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which is registered with CrossRef. Crossref is an official Digital Object Identifier Registration Agency of the International DOI Foundation. CrossRef has a fee associated with each DOI and the link to our platform must be maintained. Taylor & Francis also sends content to different platforms and partners including. OAPEN and Open Research Library so that it can be indexed and easily discoverable by researchers.
Every eBook we create has multiple different formats to support the needs of distributors. Taylor & Francis offer most of our titles in webPDF and ePub3 format for eBook aggregator distribution. One benefit of Taylor & Francis’s Open Access program is that we will continue updating to make sure the work is accessible.
Librarians and authors alike expect to see usage reports for their books. On the library side, COUNTER provides standards and logic for how usage reports should look. These reports measure how many times a book was used by an institution. Several types of reports are available, for instance, platform-level, book-level, and section-level (which may contain chapter views). We have undertaken quite a bit of work related to COUNTER usage reports and COUNTER will periodically update their standards. For instance, COUNTER 5 was released in 2019. Per customer feedback, we periodically will provide new reports such as SUSHI in 2019 and usage by license (to be released in 2021). Visit us here for more information on how librarians can get usage reports from Taylor & Francis.
Our websites are continuously updated and enhanced in order to function properly for our customers and meet the latest technology standards. On the Taylor & Francis eBooks platform we see a high amount of daily traffic, support large customers around the world, and literally host hundreds of thousands of eBooks. On the eBooks platform we have different development teams and hundreds of colleagues who support the platform.
Fill out the form below to get in touch with our Open Access Books team.