I applaud the editorial staff of the Journal of the Medical Library Association for their open access statement:

  By “open access” to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean
  its free availability on the public internet, permitting any
  users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link
  to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing,
  pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful
  purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other
  than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet
  itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and
  the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give
  authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to
  be properly acknowledged and cited. [1]

You can't get much more open than that.

Thus, for a good time, I decided to apply OAI-PMH to the whole of the Journal for the purposes of collection building, indexing, and preservation. I started out with the OAI-PMH data URL. [2] But that link will break, sort of. Instead one wants to append the Identify verb to the URL. [3] I then crawled the Journal's repository and the result was a rudimentary index complete with authors, titles, dates, citations, DOIs, abstracts, and URLs pointing to the full text. Temporarily, see [4]. I then munged (that's a techical term) the index and fed the result to my Distant Reader application. In the end a data set amenable to all sorts of different modeling processes was created. Again, temporarily see [5]. By the way, the data set includes 900 PDF files for a total of about 3.5 million words, and the whole collection process took about twenty minutes from start to finish.

In a former life, I was medical librarian in an AHEC (Area Health Education Center). Consequently, I have always been interested in medical librarianship. It is both scholarly and rigorous. 

Why should you care? Well, there are bunches o' open access journals. Some of them may fit into your library's collection development policy. You too can collect, preserve, and index this sort of journal content. I'd be more than happy to share my software, but there is a caveat: the journal in question must be published using OJS (Open Journal System). [6]

OAI-PMH is really cool. It is a shame we -- us librarians -- do not take advantage of it to a greater degree. Still, fun with librarianship.


[1] open access statement - https://jmla.mlanet.org/ojs/jmla/openaccesspolicy
[2] data URL - https://jmla.mlanet.org/ojs/jmla/oai
[3] identify - https://jmla.mlanet.org/ojs/jmla/oai?verb=Identify
[4] rudimentary bibliographic index - https://bit.ly/47L2ZnN
[5] data set - https://bit.ly/3XjG523
[6] OJS - https://pkp.sfu.ca/software/ojs/


--
Eric Lease Morgan
Librarian Emeritus, Hesburgh Libraries
University of Notre Dame