Paperity Hopes To Create A Comprehensive Index Of Open Literature

Paperity, “The first multidisciplinary aggregator of Open Access journals and papers,” launched on Oct. 8. The database currently includes more than 350,000 open access (OA) articles from 2,200-plus scholarly journals that are categorized as either gold (journals that are completely OA cover to cover) or hybrid (subscription journals with some OA articles). According to the blog post announcing Paperity’s launch, the organization’s goal is to aggregate 100% of OA literature in the next 3 years with the support of journal editors and publishers.

As defined by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), OA is “the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.” The DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) shows that more than 10,000 journals meet some definition of OA. Just as definitions and criteria for OA vary, so do assessments of the real costs of this form of information dissemination.

“Paperity is the first service of this kind,” the blog post notes. “The most similar existing website, PubMed Central [PMC], aggregates open journals, too, but is limited to life sciences alone. Another related service, the Directory of Open Access Journals, does index articles from multiple periodicals and different disciplines, but does not provide aggregation, only pure indexing: it shows metadata of articles, but for fulltext access redirects to external sites...