Dear OAISter:

Hi, I have a question about the mission of OAIster. I had assumed that
OAISter would contain only 'open access' materials--that is, if a
'digital object' was listed in OAISter, than the public would actually
have access to that digital object without paying money.

Based on this assumption, I've incorporated an OAISter lookup  (via
IndexData's publically available indexes of OAISter content) into the
Umlaut open source link resolver software. My thought was that I'd be
pointing my users to possible sources for what they are looking for,
that they almost invariably _would_ be able to actually access.

However, recently we got an 'error report' where our Umlaut link
resolver pointed the user to a resource in OAISter which turned out to
be for-pay, on BioOne. The OAISter provided URL got the user to a
metadata page, but BioOne then informed them this was not a publically
available article, and to see it they'd have to pay for it.  I suppose
that metadata page could be considered a 'digital object' in and of
itself, but this violates my expectations of OAISter--if something is in
OAISter, I thought, one should actually be able to see it, not just see
a come-on asking you for money to see it!

The particular article can be found by searching a portion of the title
in the OAISter public search: "An ecological risk assessment for
insecticides". Which results in a record with URL:
http://www.bioone.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1897%2F1551-3793%282007%293%5B373%3AAERAFI%5D2.0.CO%3B2
When I go to that URL, I get a message from BioOne, "*You must have a
subscription to view the full text of this article."*

But maybe my expectations were incorrect?  Can you tell me, does OAISter
intend to only have actual open access content? Do you consider the
inclusion of this article to be a mistake?  Or do you have no such
intention, and you are happy to index any content with metadata provided
by OAI-PMH, whether the content is for-pay for public access?  If the
latter, I wonder if you would consider making available an aggregator
consisting solely of the subset of OAISter content that IS publically
accessible?  Because many of us really do have a need for such an
aggregator, and I thought that was OAISter.

Or can you give me a list of which 'data contributors' are open access
and which are not, and perhaps I can filter out the ones which are not
on my end?  Or any other ideas you have?

Thanks for any advice,
Jonathan

--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu