The UK Serials Group has issued a report by James Culling titled Link Resolvers and the Serials Supply Chain: Final Report for UKSG.
Here’s a summary of major issues and barriers from the "Summary of Findings":
- Whilst some content providers are very aware of the role of link resolvers and the significance of data feeds to them for driving traffic to their content, there remains a significant number that do not make their collection details available to resolver suppliers at all, simply through not realising that this is a desirable thing to do.
- Whilst some content providers are very aware of the role of link resolvers and the significance of data feeds to them for driving traffic to their content, there remains a significant number that do not make their collection details available to resolver suppliers at all, simply through not realising that this is a desirable thing to do.
- Whilst link resolver suppliers state that the level of co-operation from some publishers is still not all that it might be, many publishers comment that a lack of open engagement and transparency regarding knowledge base requirements from the link resolver suppliers (as a group) has been problematic for them.
- Where data is provided to link resolver suppliers and libraries by content providers, a lack of understanding or appreciation as to the use to which the data will be put may be a factor in incompleteness and inaccuracy.
- Most of the link resolver suppliers have separately invested much time and staff resource in working around difficulties with data from content providers, rather than trying to address the problems at source. Many have concluded that full text aggregators in particular focus their energies in other areas and metadata accuracy is never (voluntarily at least) going to be of high concern to them.
- Competition between organisations in the supply chain sometimes hinders co-operation and data sharing.
- There is a lack of clarity and transparency in the supply chain regarding: standards for data formats, expected frequency of data updates, construction of inbound linking syntaxes and OpenURL support. These issues hinder broader adoption and limit the pace of information transfer through the supply chain, restricting the potential of link resolver systems.
- Whilst the community’s attention has been mostly focused on what it means to be OpenURL compliant, a code of practice and information standards to ensure optimal knowledge base compliance have been sorely absent and overlooked.