Updated Open Access Service

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Product: RapidILL

Keywords: RapidILL,Open Access, OA, Easy Lending, Unpaywall, CDI, Central Discovery Index, Resend

Story:

The RapidILL Open Access service, also known as “Easy Lending”, is a key component of the borrowing workflow and works by automatically matching borrowing requests to available open access resources. When a match is successfully found, the system downloads the file and delivers it via the requesting library’s configured preferred delivery method. Delivery for filled open access requests happens within minutes, and the borrowing library sees the request is filled by the lender symbol OPEN.

Solution:

For the past several years, RapidILL has utilized Unpaywall, a database of open access content, to match requests to OA resources. Due to Unpaywall API stability issues, we recently changed our process to check our own Central Discovery Index (CDI). Using the CDI improves the OA service in several ways:

Stability - the CDI provides an exceptionally high level of quality and stability.
Scalability - as the RapidILL community grows, so does the number of borrowing requests, and, correspondingly, the number of OA checks the system needs to make. Using the CDI ensures the process will continue to scale as needed to support users.
Additional Open Access content - the CDI indexes not only the OA content from Unpaywall, but from many other sources, as well.
Book chapters - The RapidILL Open Access service has only provided fulfilment for article requests. With the CDI, we can now extend the service to book chapter requests, as the CDI also indexes OA book content.

The Open Access process helps to provide excellent service through automated OA checks and a fast turnaround time. Additionally, the service reduces the amount of time RapidILL lenders are required to manage lending requests as each request that is filled via OA reduces the number of requests that require manual processing.

Notes:

The RapidILL team is always working on ways to improve the Open Access service and the RapidILL system in general. If you encounter any issues with a filled Open Access request, please let us know through a support case so we can review. While we have a process that reviews the matched OA content to validate that it is the requested material, the automated nature of this service can sometimes result in a problematic file. These problematic files are a small percentage of the overall filled OPEN requests, however, and the benefits of this service, as noted above, outweigh the occasional issue.

If you run into an issue with a request, and you would like it to be fulfilled by a different lender in the RapidILL community, you can use the Resend action via the RapidILL web page (see the Status Check documentation for more details). While Resend is generally used to ask the lender that filled the request for a Resend, using this action on an OPEN filled request simply moves the request to a new lender. Adding a Resend message that explains the reason the OPEN file was not sufficient for your user will help us understand how we might want to update and improve the service.

Note that if you use Rapido, you can use the Resupply action to move the request to a new lender.

Article last edited: 17-Feb-2025