Where Is That? The Challenges of Including Hybrid Journal Articles in the Library Research Process

The transition from print to electronic for scholarly communications provided an opportunity to explore alternatives to the subscription-based model for academic journals. One alternative that arose in the late 1990s was the hybrid journal. The hybrid journal is one that remains subscription-based, but provides individual authors with the option to pay a fee to have their specific articles made open access (OA) and freely available to everyone. Providing access to these articles is challenging for libraries, as the tools used to facilitate access to journal articles rely on either journal-level metadata and/or are provided by commercial entities. Publishers of hybrid journals provide different and sometimes confusing mechanisms for the identification of these articles, resulting in efforts to recommend a more consistent framework for the description of open access scholarship that will benefit researchers, libraries, and funding agencies.