I think it does not contradict copyright, but you need to create a very large number of catalog records. We used a single pointer organization's information resources system EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), which also indexed all open resources.

http://www.ebscohost.com/discovery

You can do, as open access is  free from copy right for fair/academic use

Metadata is not protected by copyright law. So you can catalogue every item, those still under copyright as well as those out of copyright protection.

Thanks to all of you.

Be sure that all the OA journals you do catalog are of good quality and not predatory in nature. To be sure, see Beall's List of predatory open access journals. They should be avoided because of unsavory business practices and many do not have policies that assure preservation and maintenance of the journal. See: http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

I think it are not copyright issues. If you would like to catalogue open access journal/book, user can all open access journals/books, only bibliography description.

I think you can do it, no copyright issues should exist for metadata records, unless there are in the records fields with non-factual data (e.g. subject classification or abstract not created by authors but by expert cataloguers). In that case you could strip down records by excluding non-factual metadata fields - you would need some automatic way (programming) to do it.

The problem is not copyright, but time.  If you think you cannot afford one of the open url services such as EBSCO or Serials Solutions provides that include OA journals , think again.  While they cannot be 100% accurate either maintaining an accurate list of good quality OA journals will still be an ongoing and time-consuming (costly) project for a staff member.  If you do it, my recommendation would be to select and include a subset of important OA journals in the fields of interest to your users.  That will be difficult enough to maintain.  You cannot hope to be comprehensive.

mere bibligraphical detals never be copyright violation

It may makes sense to catalogue OA books of your library/institute's interest as OPAC is library's primary point of search and access for books.  But it may not be advisable to index journal articles as the number would be larger.  For example,  in our J-Gate database, (www.jgateplus.com) which is by far the largest e-Journal database of 41,000 journals,  we have  20,000+ scholarly & technical journals from OA domain.  14,000+ titles are peer-reviewed OA journals.  OA domain journals contribute around 7 million articles to our J-Gate database accounting  for 15% of the papers.  If your OA journal list is small and if you have automated metadata harvesting  facility, you may want to extract and add article metadata from OA journals.  If you are talking about harvesting the entire full-text and adding to your local repository, it will be certainly a copy right issue for which you will need to obtain permission form publishers. 

Hi,

I guess that technically they could but I am not sure the libraries , at this stage, would like to include open access journals in their collection.

It has not problematic to link open access resources on the library websites. If any online resources is copyrighted material, then it is secured by passwords or IP authenticated. Files of such resources do not open without password or similarity of IP address. The technology is very advanced now and publishers prior know how to secure copyrighted material.

You can catalog what you like or make bibliographic database of materials of any kind. You can also add links to open or closed materials - in the latter case user will be asked to pay. There is other problem with links in OPAC. URLs are ferquently changed and even materials are disappearing, so it is very difficult to maintain

Most academic libraries (that I know) already include open access journals in their catalog though their openlink resolver system. One just "activates" a whole bunch of them in a couple of clicks. The drawback is that there are many crap titles in the OA world. The Beal's List is a good tool to detect the bad ones even if it is not perfect.

Harvesting the entire full-text and adding to your local repository,  definitely it will be copy right voilation

The copyright law (US) has been evolving  since 1790. The net effect of this evolution is a constant erosion of the purpose and spirit  of the law which is to "stimulate the sciences and useful arts, by securing limited control to authors over their works ", that limited control at that time was only 14 years, then it was extended to 28 years + 28 years more if renewed. However, the most important significant  change in terms of access to the law came with the 1976 Copyright Act, which entered into effect in 1978, which includes at leas 3 or four sections liberalizing access under specific conditions  (section 106 authors exclusives rights and section 107 Fair use rights) and were also intended to settled the period of the protection which was changed to the author's  life + 70 years. This law intended to stop the erosion of the purpose of the law but despite it the erosion continues and the provisions established under the 1976, Act (fair use)  and the "First sale doctrine" are under constant attack by the economic establishment, as the recent cases at the Supreme Court confirmed. For example, libraries can circulate books and make loans thanks to one of the provision of the "First Sale doctrine" which established that once the library buy (buy not licence) an artifact it can do whatever with it, not its content but the artifact (it can loan it, give it away, display it, etc). Two recent cases were challenging the "First Sale doctrine" in court  Omega v Cotsco  and KIRTSAENG v. JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC. If the Supreme Court had supported  Wiley's position, the result would had been that libraries can not circulate books!!! The American Libraries Association did a wonderful job defending the role of libraries and KIRTSAENG prevailed, but I guess that sooner or later the attacks would come again.

The previous introduction  was to establish the complexity of the copyright law and the economic interests which led to the alternative avenue we have today, that of Open Access. However, open access  comes in "many flavors", mixed economic models and also complex  issues. BUT it is  a whole lot more flexible than copyright law. I recommend that you read "the Nine flavors of Open Access" and keep in mind that as many colleagues have said bibliographic information & metadata are not copyrighted, but I would make sure that even that a work said it is Open Access, it might not be totally free....and certain restrictions might still applied. Good Luck

Discussions made by Ketty Rodriguez is informative and her analysis regarding copyright law is also meaningful. But I have to add only that libraries sometimes spread the works done by an author and make them reachable to the knowledge community, hence benefits the authors also making his/her work more potent to be circulated/bought/subscribed. Sometimes libraries minimizes subscription/purchase of a material if it is repeatedly loaned to its users. Copyright law is necessary to preserve rights of authors, however libraries are also essential as it disseminates information which is a social property and needful for further research/study..   

The copyrights issues existing in the US are not always applicable in other countries. As to the  ability to catalog open access journal, it is suggested that each of these journals will be checked for quality before cataloging it, since material stored in libraries deserve such quality check that differentiate it from the free online literature.

Once the resources are Open Access then there is no need to worry.   As long as you are sure that these are open access resources then they can be addd to the collection.

Dear Mr. Singh,

You can catalog Open Access Resources in your KOHA OPAC. There will not be any copyright issue in this regard as they are available in open access. Moreover providing the bibliographical data of a publication source will not come under copyright infringement. This is what I know. Thanks & Regards

Definitely Koha work with open access resources, I believe there should not be any problem at all

Another approach might be to create descriptive  OPAC entries for DOAB - The Directory of Open Access Books; and DOAJ- The Directory of Open Access Journals.  Links to doab.org and doaj.org can direct users to search and browse functions. These directories provide quality, free, wide ranging discipline content. And they are kept up to date centrally.

The bibliographic information (metadata) is not covered under intellectual property rights. You can add it to your catalogue. But time and efforts are the biggest challenge

I just came across this thread. I would also add that another consideration beyond copyright is whether the record created based on the Open Access item being cataloged is compatible with any library consortium rules you may be subject to.