Developing a Library Open Access Portal That Bypasses the Need for Authentication

Texas A&M University was established as Texas’ only land grant university through the First Morrill Act (1862), which sought to provide a broad segment of the population with a practical education that had direct relevance to their daily lives. Our impact on society was later expanded through the creation of the agricultural experiment stations and the Cooperative Extension Service, which disseminate the results of experiment station research to improve the state’s agricultural industry. The Sterling C. Evans Library at Texas A&M is building upon this history to help bring all of Texas A&M’s scholarly work to bear on many of society’s greatest challenges by promoting open access. We are working to identify and advance appropriate information systems, practices, and policies that improves societal access to the scholarly and creative work at Texas A&M. The Texas A&M University Libraries, has begun work to design a portal that bypasses the need for authentication and allows a user to search through a collection of open access materials. Working with Ex Libris, the vendor from which we license our Primo discovery layer, we have installed a separate instance of Primo aimed at aggregating open access materials and making them accessible to the public. This dedicated portal will draw materials identified as open access from the Primo Central Index, a “meta-aggregation of hundreds of millions of scholarly e-resources of global and regional importance,” including “journal articles, e-books, reviews, legal documents and more.” We are currently working to have OAK Trust open access items harvested into Primo Central and made available alongside harvests from other institutional repositories. In establishing this Portal to Open Access Resources, we will also work to identify materials that are legitimately open access (gratis) and that meet basic quality standards.

This poster presentation will discuss the technical aspects and policy decisions made during the design and implementation phase of the project, and show how the portal supports a Texas A&M University – K12 School District reforming their science, technological, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education.