I think that this news is quite significant: Automated identification of Open Access (OA) articles from hybrid journals is now working.
This is a highly important development in the efforts being made towards enabling systematic and easy identification of Open Access articles in hybrid journals – for aggregators, discovery services and Abstract & Indexing service providers – and it is also significant for researchers and others who want to discover and identify always-freely-available articles wherever they may appear (in OA journals, hybrid journals, or journals to which they or their institution subscribe).
A hybrid journal is a journal where only some of the articles are Open Access.
The solution to automating the identification of OA articles in hybrid journals is based upon Table of Contents (TOC) RSS feeds.
A publisher wanting to support the automated discovery of Open Access from its journals only needs to create its RSS feeds by following these best practices and these steps.
I’ve written about this issue several times in the past, and now there is a simple solution which is being put into practice. The solution could be used by various discovery services. JournalTOCs is currently demonstrating it here.
In the above screen dump, the third item is an Open Access article published in a hybrid journal.
More information about this exciting new development is available at the JournalTOCs Blog.
Roddy Macleod's Blog 