Part I: Discover, Fulfill, & Provide Stability: Atla Continues Expansion of Open Access Content

When it comes to Atla’s research tools, our goal is to create a robust and diverse content collection for our users. Open access content is an expanding model that has some unique benefits related to discovery, fulfillment, and stability. Here’s how Atla is working to deliver those benefits to our publishers, researchers, and scholars:

Discoverability

When indexing content for Atla Religion Database^® (Atla RDB^®), our in-house team of more than ten metadata analysts and editors work to assign the most accurate and robust metadata possible to ensure the content we are including is discoverable. In order to deepen our research collection, our team seeks high-quality content from a breadth of authors, institutions, and platforms. By expanding our content acquisition to include more open access sources, our goal is to expand service delivery throughout the global academic community.

Currently, we have full-text content from thirty-nine countries, and indexed content from seventy-six countries, all in over forty languages. However, in many countries, there continues to be a lack of access to robust print publishing industries and/or infrastructures. With the introduction of open access publishing models, more publishers, researchers, and scholars are also able to create, host, and distribute their content, and contribute their diverse perspectives to this academic community.

Fulfillment

In addition to making content discoverable, our team wants to help fulfill content searches by:

• Including all identifying numbers open access content provides, including ISSNs and hot-linked DOIs, allowing users to locate the material wherever it may be hosted.
• Including the actual articles from open access journals (where possible) within our full-text tools, AtlaSerials^® (Atlas^®), and AtlaSerials PLUS^® (Atlas PLUS^®).

Providing Stability

Unfortunately, with as many benefits as open access can provide, there remain some obstacles. The infrastructure surrounding open access content is not always well established and is often transient, meaning hosting sites and link destinations often jump around. This is another reason why including the actual full-text articles from open access journals in Atla full-text tools is beneficial to the scholarly community. Immediate access to the articles within our databases mitigates the risk of not being able to find the desired open access content if the link destination or original hosting site has changed. This is can be especially true for some single-title publishers.

Connecting Content & Users

By including more open access content in our research tools, we are able to connect more scholars with relevant, readily available content. Ultimately, the goal is always to ensure ease of content discoverability and information access for all our users.

If you have open access journals that you would like to recommend for inclusion in our research tools, get in touch with us.

Stay tuned for part two of our open access series in June, where we’ll highlight how to search for open access content in our tools, the type of open access content we include, and more.