Open access publishing and Creative Commons (CC) licenses are two pathways for enabling more seamless access to content and fostering downstream use. Funders, research institutions, and publishers have invested greatly in developing policies, technologies, and workflows on the author side to support and/or mandate open access and CC licensing.This poster reports on two research projects undertaken as part of a broader initiative to investigate the user experience side of how publisher platforms signal access and re-use licensing to the reader. The poster will also present recommendations for the industry based on the findings.
Access indicators help communicate what type of access a user has to an article; however, open access indicators are not standardized within the industry, and users have often been confused about whether they have access to the article. After the pilot study reported in <em>The Scholarly Kitchen</em>, we expanded the analysis to a larger set of publishers. Our results show that there is significant inconsistency of indicators in use.
CC licenses allow creators to attach re-use statements to their works and communicate to readers how content can be re-used. Display of CC licenses across publisher platforms varies greatly and even within their platforms (search results, tables of contents, article landing pages, downloadable PDFs, etc.).
Our findings will be of interest to publishers whose platforms are shaping the user experience and librarians who work to help users navigate whether they have access and determine how they can re-use content.
Smart Citations