Lothar Nunnenmacher, a library professional at Lib4RI, discusses the development of their unified search tool that integrates diverse data sources, including DOAJ metadata, to help researchers navigate complex open access publishing options. In an interview with Head of Community and Communications Katrine Sundsbø, Lothar emphasises the importance of accurate, up-to-date metadata in DOAJ for managing article processing charges and highlights future goals for better highlighting Diamond open access journals.
Hello Lothar, tell us a little bit about yourself and your background
I studied horticultural sciences and then did a PhD in agroecology. After a degree as an information manager for the life sciences, I started my work in librarianship in the university library at TU Berlin as a subject librarian for horticulture and landscape planning.
It’s a bit of a change to go from agroecology to the library world, what made you want to work in a library?
I did a lot of literature work in my PhD, and was the person to go to in my team as I had a mail merge for the lending sheets to print out from the literature management system that was very useful. This is when we still had to get print material. But these are old stories!
Yes, of course, tell us about your work now and Lib4RI and how it has developed
Since 2010, I have been working on building up Lib4RI, which is the joint library for the research institutes within the ETH Domain. The ETH Domain is the federally funded research body in Switzerland and consists of two universities, the ETH Zurich and the EPF Lausanne, and four research institutes, all four in the field of science and technology.
The four research institutes had very small libraries, with few people, and mostly based on print materials. It made sense to merge the libraries, and the four institutes are very happy about having a larger joint library. We serve about 1,500 scientists and around 650 PhD students, so we mainly focus on services for research.
Tell me about the Lib4RI Search Tool
Our researchers aren’t that interested in the traditional library catalogue. So when we built our website, we felt that a library catalogue should not be the center of the page, as is usually the case. We thought about which sources would make sense to highlight, and based on that, we developed this bento box approach for the search tool. So, there are lots of different sources in one tool, making a lot of our discovery possibilities visible at a glance. The next step was then to integrate all the information on publishing in journals in the same tool.
In libraries there are a lot of different discovery tools for different services and even for publishing information there are several tools. We’ve tried to unify these into one service. DOAJ data is one of the sources for this tool, as well as for example Scopus and Web of Science. We also use the Jisc open policy finder for Green open access. The only information we curate ourselves is on our agreements with publishers.
Open access has gotten really complicated in recent years, with different options like Green open access, Read-and-Publish-Agreements, and Gold open access. For each of these options there is relevant information for the researchers, which can make it very confusing for them. So, the Lib4RI Search Tool combines everything through APIs. We still get emails from researchers asking us questions about their options for publishing open access in a certain journal, and then we can simply send them a link to the corresponding journal in our search tool.
What’s the importance of having DOAJ journal metadata integrated in the tool?
A preferred open access publishing option for our researchers is these agreements we have with publishers, where they can publish open access in specific journals without paying additional fees. If this is not possible, the gold route is a viable alternative, but that often includes a cost. This is important information for the researcher – and for us, as we have a threshold for APCs in our Gold open access fund. This will also be the same for the Swiss National Science Foundation, there is not a threshold now, but there will be one next year. Therefore, it’s very important that this information is correct in DOAJ, because we work with this information every day through requests.
Unfortunately, we have come across incorrect APC information a lot in the last years, also for journals from big publishers. Even though we’ve seen subscription prices level off in recent years, now the APCs are going up tremendously.
You and I have previously discussed how DOAJ curates original metadata, and the need for publishers and journals to keep their information up to date, as well as what DOAJ does to keep the metadata accurate. What more do you think can be done?
I was glad to see that the DOAJ has been working with the publishers to build up pipelines to keep such important information up to date, through annual bulk updates of records. We hope that publishers will use such possibilities now. I noticed that APCs of, for example, Wiley and Springer Nature seem to be correct, now. We appreciate this curation activity.
If publishers do not update their journal information, we hope that DOAJ, but also the libraries, are putting some pressure on the publishers to do so. We try to address this topic also as a part of our negotiations with publishers.
What would you like to see in the future for DOAJ?
We would like to flag Diamond open access channels in our search tool with a special symbol – and Diamond means more than ‘no APC’, it also means community owned, for example. This gets very complicated in terms of the big American societies that don’t really behave like nonprofits. There is work going on in Europe to gather European Diamond journals, but I wouldn’t like to have more databases. I would like to see this information in DOAJ.
And, of course, I would like to see that more than 90% or even 99% of the APCs are correct in DOAJ. Tracking changes in APCs and providing information on APCs for past periods could also be helpful to the library community.
Dr. Lothar Nunnenmacher
