Primary publishers often publish articles online first, ahead of print. Such articles are not yet assigned to an issue. When these articles are assigned to an issue, their metadata is updated with the volume, issue, and page information.

In case the customers have rights for these articles from the publishers, the availability indication and the linking are working as expected, as the articles are available on the publishers' platforms. However, when customers have activated aggregator portfolios for these articles, specifically from EBSCO and ProQuest, these records may appear falsely as Full Text available.

The reason is that the aggregators often do not have these articles in full text; they are only indexed and available from the aggregators' platform after an issue is assigned to them. The customer will experience a result that shows a Full Text indication, but when following the link to the aggregator platform, the article will not be there.

Ex Libris is planning to solve this problem in two steps:

1. Detection and flagging: The first step is to detect and flag these articles correctly. Since there is no standard way for publishers to indicate “ahead of print” articles, the detection is planned to be based on the metadata: journal articles from the last 6 months, without volume and issue information. The records will be flagged with a new CDI Document Attribute called Online First Article. This document attribute will be available from the CDI June release onwards
2. Rights Processing Exception: After completing the first step and determining that our detection rules are valid, we will add an exception to the Rights processing so that records will not be flagged as full text when the activation is coming from an aggregator collection. This change will be made cautiously so as not to affect good records appearing as Full Text available. Currently, we do not have a release date for this stage.

What can we do till then?