DUBLIN, Ohio, 23 OCTOBER 2020—OCLC is supporting libraries, researchers, educators and students with high-quality open access content that is discoverable and freely accessible through WorldCat Discovery and WorldCat.org.

“Libraries are increasingly managing open access scholarly publications as part of their overall content management,” said Suzanne Kemperman, OCLC Director, Business Development and Publisher Relations. “The inclusion of open access (OA) content and open educational resources (OER) in WorldCat increases discovery and access to these valuable scholarly materials and eliminates barriers to information seekers.”

OCLC is making open content more discoverable and accessible through expanding collections and user-friendly discovery services.

"Open access to content is important, but without discoverability, OA is nothing,” said Martin Paul Eve, Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing and the Strategic Lead in Digital Education, Birkbeck, University of London. “Our partnership with OCLC will ensure that Open Library of Humanities titles are ingested into library catalogues worldwide, showcasing our open-access model, free to everyone, forever."

The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a charitable organization dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges (APCs). OLH publishes 28 peer-reviewed journals and is funded by an international consortium of almost 300 libraries committed to the mission of making scholarly publishing fairer, more accessible, and rigorously preserved for the digital future. OLH won several awards, including the 2020 AOP Small Digital Publisher of the Year award, the Coko Open Publishing Award from 2019, and a high commendation from the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing 2020.

Open access content, including open educational resources, can provide faculties and students much needed scholarly information online while they are teaching and learning remotely, especially during the pandemic.

“Thanks to growing campus support, many instructors are interested in or have already redesigned their curricula to include OER,” said Karen Lauritsen, Publishing Director, Open Education Network. “The benefits, including increased affordability, access, and flexibility have been especially important this year. With that in mind, working to make OER discoverable is an important step in supporting student learning.”

The Open Education Network (OEN) is based at the Center for Open Education in the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development. The OEN community includes more than 1,200 campuses. Together they develop shared strategies for building open education programs and support the Open Textbook Library, a comprehensive resource for openly licensed academic textbooks. The library currently includes more than 800 textbooks which cover a range of key subject areas including Business, Law, Medicine and Social Sciences; all are free, and the majority are peer reviewed.

A variety of open access content is currently available through WorldCat, both from traditional publishers as well as from leading open access providers, including:

• Directory of Open Access Books
• Directory of Open Access Journals
• HathiTrust
• Knowledge Unlatched
• Open Access Publishing in European Networks
• OAIster
• Open Book Publishers
• OpenEdition
• Open Textbook Library
• Paperity
• Persée
• PLOS
• Project Gutenberg
• SciELO (The Scientific Online Library)

OCLC partners with more than 400 publishers and content providers to proactively obtain bibliographic records with holdings attached. This ensures that library collections are kept up to date—critical for rapidly changing e-titles and e-collections.

OCLC brings the power of the world’s largest library cooperative to support open access initiatives at scale. For publishers and content providers, OCLC brings visibility to open content. For libraries and their users, OCLC helps prioritize open collections for optimal discovery and access.

More about OCLC’s open access initiatives is on the website.

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