WorldShare Acquisitions release notes, March 2026

Administrative actions

These items require immediate action or decisions.

Follow-up actions

In an effort to keep your staff informed of new features and changes, you may also want to consider these items.

Support for open access article processing charges (APCs)

You can now track and process the workflow for payment of article processing charges for authors at your institution wanting to publish open access. This saves you the time and effort of manually tracking these APCs in a spreadsheet or other tool and also provides additional reporting and analytics functionality. Previously, you could not track open access APC requests in Acquisitions, but now you can, allowing you to manage the entire "APC" workflow within Acquisitions, including record payment.  

To process and pay open access article processing charges, you should:

1. In the left-hand menu, go to Open Access > Open Access Requests. 

   

2. This will take you to a search screen of open access requests.  It will be empty for your institution initially because no requests exist.
3. You will also notice that the screen uses the new modernized user interface framework currently being previewed in Circulation and elsewhere in WorldShare. This new functionality uses the modernized user interface and tests a number of new patterns used by this user interface. We welcome feedback on this new interface via the Community Center. However, there are some limitations to it currently due to the way the new interface works with the current left-hand menu. These will be discussed further below and will be resolved when we move entirely to the modernized interface.
4. Click "Create open access request" at the top of the screen to create an APC request from an author. 

   

5. In the resulting dialog, enter your article title and article type (e.g., research article). The options in the article type field are based on the JATS XML standard.  Click save when you are done. 

   

6. This will then take you to the new open access request edit screen. This introduces a new UI pattern that we hope to use in the future in other places in the application.  We welcome feedback on it. It allows you to view all content in read-only format. To edit the request, you must edit one section at a time.
7. Click "Edit information" in the first "Article" section of the open access request.
8. This will open an editable view of this section. Only the Title and Type are required, but you can optionally fill out any of the other fields. These include:
   1. License (e.g., CC BY)
   2. URL
   3. Abstract
   4. DOI
   5. Manuscript identifier
   6. PMCID
   7. PMID
   8. Status (e.g., Submitted, Accepted, Published, etc.)
   9. Submission Date (if applicable)
   10. Acceptance Date (if applicable)
   11. Publication Date (if applicable)
9. When you are done, save your changes by clicking save in the top-right of the section header. 

   

10. Next, go to the Authors section. There should be no authors added yet. Click "Manage Authors".
11. From here, you can add authors in 4 different ways:
    1. From the EIDM patron database. (This is the default and most prominent way to add authors who are members of your institution.)
    2. Using ORCID (if the author provides their ORCID)
    3. Using ISNI (if the author provides their ISNI)
    4. Manually (if no other method is supported)
12. You MUST select an author from the patron database at your institution if the author is the requesting author, i.e., the author who is requesting from the library payment of the APC. The requesting author is required before approval and payment of the open access request. If the requesting author is not in the patron database, you must first add him/her to the patron database.
13. To add a requesting author, first enter the first or last name of the requesting author in the autocomplete near the top of the screen. This will present matches for requesting authors from your patron database. 

    

14. Select the requesting author from the autocomplete.
15. Select the "Requesting author" checkbox below the autocomplete to make this author the requesting author.  

    

16. You may also select "Corresponding author" if the author is also the corresponding author. (This is typically the case.)
17. To add more member institution authors, repeat this process without selecting the "Requesting author" checkbox.
18. To add an author using ORCID, click "Other options" > "Add using ORCID", enter the ORCID of the author, then confirm the selection of that author.
19. To add an author using ISNI,  click "Other options" > "Add using ISNI", enter the ISNI of the author, then confirm the way you want the author's name to display in the interface. (ISNI has a number of options, and these are presented to you for selection.)
20. If there are authors NOT in the patron database (that is, not a member of your institution) and for whom you do not have an ORCID or ISNI, click "Other options" > "Add using manual entry".  On the resulting dialog, enter the "Given name," "Family name," and "Published name" of the author you are adding.  

    

21. When you are finished adding all authors that you wish to add for the article, return to the article record by clicking "Return to create article record" at the top of the page.
22. The next section on the open access request is the Journal section. To add a journal record to the article, click "Select WorldCat record' in the top-right of the journal section.  

    

23. This will open a dialog that allows you to search WorldCat for your journal or e-journal record. Conduct your search and click "Select" next to the appropriate journal record. 

    

24. This will fill in key journal information in the "Journal" section on the screen.  Journal is a required field. 

    

25. The last required field before you can approve and pay the request is Publisher. This is in the Request section. Click on "Edit request information" to edit this section.
26. The publisher must be an in-use vendor in your library's vendor database, so please add it first if required. The publisher will typically be the publisher of the journal in question rather than an aggregator.
27. To select a publisher, type the publisher's name in the autocomplete. Select the vendor/publisher. Then save the entire section using the save button in the top-right of the section.

    

28. Also note that this section includes information about the requesting author (taken from the Authors section).  You can even easily copy the requesting author's e-mail if you need to correspond with them. The request type is also displayed, but at this time, it will only be "APC (Article Processing Charges)". We may add more types in the future and welcome feedback on other open access request types.
29. Next, you need to approve the open access request. Scroll to the top of the screen and click "Approve request." (Warning: This action cannot be undone.)
30. The open access request will be listed as "approved" at the top of the page. 

    

31. Lastly, you need to invoice the APC request. This is done in the "Invoice information" section at the bottom of the request. Scroll down and click "Add to invoice."
32. This will take you to a new page where you can select an invoice to which to add your open access request as an invoice item. You can search for invoices using a number of search options and filters. The search box that displays above the table performs a general keyword search. To search a specific field or to filter your results, click on the filter icon at the top of the table.  

    

33. This will be the new way of accessing filters in tables in the modernized user interface.
34. Once you have found the invoice you want to add the request to, simply click "Add to invoice" next to the invoice itself. 

    

35. You can also click "New invoice" at the top of the table to add your open access request to a new invoice. This will open a dialog where you can enter the details of the new invoice. 

    

36. To both create the invoice and add the request to the invoice as an  item, click "Save and add." (Do not do this if this request is only a test, as it will require more clean-up work down the road.)
37. When you have added a request to an invoice (as an invoice item), it will appear in the "Invoices added" section at the top of the "Add to invoice" page.  Each invoice will appear here in a rectangular box with key information about the invoice added.

    

38. You can add requests to multiple invoices, but to our knowledge, this is not the typical workflow. You may also add requests to invoices whose vendor is different from the publisher of the open access request. This is because sometimes libraries pay consortia or other "agents" instead of the vendor directly.
39. When you are done, you probably will want to navigate the invoice in question to pay the invoice. However, here is where a key limitation of the system must be mentioned.  Unlike other areas of acquisitions (e.g., orders, order items, invoices, etc.), open access requests do not open a request in a new tab in the left-hand menu. For this reason, once you navigate away from the open access request, you may have to search for and find your open access request again to open it if you need to return to it for some reason. This is due to technical constraints in integrating the new modernized user interface framework with the current left-hand navigation. This problem will be solved when the left-hand menu moves to the new framework. You will see a preview of this in the coming months, but the new left-hand menu may not be available by default to all libraries for some time.  Therefore, one should be careful when navigating away from the open access request. If you do, you may have to search for and find the request again to open or edit it. 
40. One final note, however: While one cannot use the left-hand navigation to easily return to the previously opened request (because of the lack of left-hand tabs), you can use the back button to return to the previous open access request screen, even if you have navigated to another section (e.g., invoices to pay the invoice). With the new modernized UI, we are making sure all pages have concrete URLs and can be returned to using the back button. This is a workaround if you want to return to your open access request without searching for the request again.
41. At this point, you can then close the open access request and return to the search screen by clicking "Close" twice at the top of the page. Your request should appear on the page now.
42. A few notes about the open access request search screen:
    1. The search box in the top-right performs a general keyword search and is useful for quickly finding a specific open access request.
    2. As stated previously, to access filters, click on the Filter icon to the right of the search box. There are many filters available, which can be combined to narrow down your search as desired.
    3. You can configure the columns you wish to display using the third icon from the left.  

       

    4. You can even change the order of the columns on the screen by dragging and dropping the columns into a different order.
    5. The column configuration will be saved by default for multiple sessions.
    6. To return to the previous default set of columns, click the refresh icon between the filter icon and the column configuration icon. 

       

    7. You can also download a CSV of a single page of results using the menu at the top far right of the table.   

       

    8. As with previous search screens, you can sort by many of the columns as well. Title is the default sort order.
    9. This same essential search table or "data grid" will be used throughout Acquisitions in the future.  Feedback is welcome!
43. As is typical with Acquisitions, if you followed these steps to create an open access request, you have created data that will stay in the system if not deleted. So you may wish to delete this request if it represents only test data. You can do this as long as you have not added the request to an invoice. (If you have, you need to delete the resulting invoice item first.)  
44. To delete the open access request, simply reopen it, and click "Delete" at the top of the screen.

    

45. A platform API is forthcoming for open access requests that will enable you to create and update requests programmatically as well as search for them. This could even enable libraries to create web forms for authors submitting requests that automatically create open access requests for library staff members to review.
46. Analytics will also be offering a new set of open access data points in the near future, so that you can create reports of open access request data.  These will be available in the next few months, but you will need to wait until authoring is available in the Power BI interface in Analytics for it to be fully useful. This is also coming by approximately summer time.  Watch the analytics release schedule and updates for more information on this.

 Visit Open access requests for additional information and workflows.

Automatically retrieve files via SFTP without write permissions

You can now automatically retrieve files from vendor SFTP servers even if you do not have write permissions. This saves you the time and effort of manually retrieving these files and uploading them to WMS. Previously, you could retrieve files from SFTP servers that allowed you to rename the files after retrieving them, but now, you can also configure automated jobs to retrieve files from servers without write permissions (where you cannot rename the files). 

To use this feature :

1. In the left-hand menu, go to "Automated Jobs" > "Jobs."
2. Search for an existing automated job or create a new automated job. (The automated job must be one of the "import" types, such as order import, invoice import, etc.)
3. Edit the automated job.
4. In the "Post processing" section, you will see a new radio button option called "Do not rename files (no write permissions to folder)". 

   

5. Ideally, you would only use this option if the vendor did NOT grant you write permissions to their SFTP folder, so that Acquisitions could rename the files after retrieval.
6. Select this option and save the job.
7. When this option is selected, and the job runs, the system will retrieve the file from the SFTP server as normal, but in this case, will track the file retrieved rather than renaming it.  This will allow the system to avoid retrieving the file again the next time the job runs.  It only tracks the file retrieved after you have selected this option, so make sure any files retrieved and imported before this have been deleted or renamed.  If you don't the the job will retrieve all files that meet the criteria in the automated job. This can result in creating data twice, although oftentimes when importing the retrieved file, the import will fail because the data is duplicated, but it depends on the exact nature of the data being re-imported.
8. This ability to retrieve files without write permissions could provide especially useful for libraries using the WorldCat Cataloging Partners service to import invoice and/or shelf-ready data. This process posts files to OCLC's File-X servers, which do not currently support write permissions.

 Visit Automate file retrieval and import for additional information and workflows.

New order APIs

We’re introducing a new Order Management experience for orders and order items.  Previously, the search was narrow, limited by order state and last update, and order items were tied to one order at a time.  With the new API, users can more easily search and retrieve orders and order items, look up orders using additional values such as name, vendor and other details, and submit orders with a single, straightforward step. Additionally, support for looking up addresses and departments is now included.

If you use the old Purchase Orders integration...
Libraries and vendors with custom connections to the previous Purchase Orders API should plan to move to the new Order Management API. The old API will be retired; the exact date has not yet been set. Moving early reduces risk and lets you use the improvements above.

To request WSKey access to these new APIs, go to: https://platform.worldcat.org/wskey/ .

To view the specifications for these new API endpoints, go to: https://developer.api.oclc.org/wms-acq-v2.  New API endpoints will be available here on Friday, March 27, 2026.

Child Funds on Renewal List Now Populating

Target child funds on renewal lists are now populating appropriately by default. Previously, if an item being renewed had a default target fund that was a child fund, it was not populating in the list of mapped funds on the renewal list page. A user had to manually map these target funds instead. This is now working, and the funds are being populated as appropriate. This was fixed in a previous release.

Sending Serial Claims to Multiple Vendors Uses Correct Vendor Contact   

When sending serial issue claims to multiple vendors, the system now uses the correctly specified vendor contact to send the messages. Previously, it would send these messages to the first contact for the vendor regardless of the notification settings for that vendor. Now, it sends all messages to the correct vendor contact when claiming from a single vendor or multiple vendors.

Open access requests do not open in tabs in the left-hand menu

Due to limitations in integrating the new modernized user interface with the existing left-hand menu, open access requests will not open in a tab in the left-hand menu like other acquisition data objects (e.g., orders, order items, invoices). Instead, they will appear on the screen while working on them, but if you navigate away from the screen, you may have to search for them again to open them.  To workaround this issue, you may use the back button to return to the specific open access request.  This problem will be fixed when the left-hand menu is moved to the new framework.  A preview of this new left-hand menu will be available to users who enable it in the coming months.

Support website(s)

Support information for this product and related products can be found at:

• WorldShare Acquisitions
• Contact OCLC Support
• OCLC Community Center
• Browser compatibility chart