A recent report on Open Access predicts that over the next 10 years the proportion of Open Access articles is likely to increase by 15-50%. The scale of the shift will depend on national and international policy decisions.

Libraries have a key role to play in making Open Access articles discoverable by the use of metadata and managing institutional repositories.

Research data is always more discoverable if it is well described. As more and more data are made available online, the need for high quality indexing, using standardised vocabularies such as taxonomies and ontologies, becomes greater.While many disciplines have developed highly specialised vocabularies, much of the research done today is interdisciplinary.