Section outline

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    Introduction

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    • How to make your journal and its publications more interoperable with aggerators, for indexing or with other systems?
      This course takes journal editors and managers through the topics of metadata formats, metadata exchange protocols and introduces the OpenAIRE Guidelines.

      More self-paced course are available on TIB's TOERN platform.

      Key takeaways: 

      • examples for successful implementation of human and machine readable metadata information
      • which common metadata exchange protocols exist open access publishing with a focus on OAI-PMH
      • introduction to the OpenAIRE Guidelines

      Estimated course time: 45 minutes 

    • Announcements Forum
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    Glossary

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    Human and machine-readable metadata support interoperability

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    Metadata exchange protocols (OAI-PMH) increase metadata exchange

    • OAI-PMH Lesson

      This self-guided lesson introduces the basic principles and functionalities of OAI-PMH.

      After reaching the end of the lesson, return to the course page.

    • OAI-PMH Quiz

      This quiz asks about the essetials of OAI-PMH and aims to support you in taking stock at your own journal.

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    The OpenAIRE Guidelines collect a set to best practices and quality standards

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    A real life example from a European publishing platform

    • Often we learn the most from real life examples. They show theoretical concepts in practice and help us in transferring these concepts to our own publishing workflows.

      We chose the case of the Finnish plaform journal.fi as an example for how the technical aspects introduced in this self-course can be put into practice. 

      Interoperability aspect Implementation
      Text and data mining is technically supported available via OAI-PMH
      Full-text machine readable format OJS supports any publishing format.  Publishers decide the format they want to use. JATS XML is used by very few probably 2/139 - because most journals lack the skills and resources to produce JATS XML
      Metadata about OA status For example, the OpenAIRE OAI-PMH  feed includes the OA status of each individual article.
      OpenAIRE Guidelines OpenAIRE plug-in is turned on site wide

      For a larger number of examples, refer to the case studies section in Armengou et al. (2023).

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    Conclusions

    • After completing this self-paced course, you have learned about human and machine-readable metadata, the metadata exchange protocol OAI-PMH and the OpenAIRE Guidelines and how they contribute to your journals' interoperability.
      Or in the word of Armengou et al., 2023, p.30-31:

      «Interoperability of technical systems is a prerequisite for optimal machine-based communication.
      It takes a seamless multidirectional exchange of metadata to unfold the full potential of institutional publishing platforms and support value-added services.»

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    Additional ressources

    • If you're interested in learning more about technical standards that support the findability of your journal, we collected some ressources with additional training material below.

    • FAIR Publishing Self-Assessment Grid URL

      The FAIR publishing toolkit was created by Arnaud Gingold (AMU) in 2025. It is meant to help either publishers or publishing services undertake a self-assessment of their data collections according to the FAIR principles. The final goal is to increase the data and metadata quality of their content so it becomes more easily and more broadly discoverable.

      As a self-assessment toolkit, it provides a review grid that does not include any evaluation, especially since there is no automated assessment. It instead supports a manual, but guided, adapted, and open assessment of the FAIR principles implementation.

    • CRAFT-OA Webinar “OpenAlex – a game changer for citation databases?” URL

      This 2025 CRAFT-OA webinar with Bernhard Mittermaier (Forschungszentrum Jüllich) introduces OpenAlex as an alternative to proprietory data bases.

    • CRAFT-OA Webinar: Metadata Introduction and Metadata Healthcheck with Crossref [Advanced] URL

      Are you already registering your metadata with Crossref? 
      Take a look at this CRAFT-OA webinar with Luis Montilla (Crossref) which shows the "Participation Tool" using the example of TIB Open Publishing.