Panel We1

Day/Time: Wednesday, May 12, 2:45 PM to 3:45 PM

How DOAJ disseminates metadata from your open access journal to key discovery services worldwide

Presenter:

  • Dom Mitchell, Operations Manager, DOAJ

Description:

DOAJ works with all the major discovery services. All article metadata uploaded to DOAJ is available for free. It is collected and disseminated around the world. Why is this important? DOAJ is the world’s most diverse directory of open access journals. We have a long tail of small single journals that represent the true nature of open access publishing globally. Visibility for these journals is key to survival and being in indexed in DOAJ can help with that. This short presentation will show how this is achieved and why this is important.

Save our Search: Ways to improve online journal discoverability

Presenters:

  • Jennifer Kemp, Head of Partnerships at Crossref
  • Brian Cody, Scholastica CEO and Co-founder
Description:
Publishing journal articles online is like releasing them into an ocean of content brimming with discovery opportunities — but also some potential perils. To prevent articles from getting lost at sea and increase overall journal visibility in the overcrowded scholarly landscape, publishers must ensure readers can easily find their content when surfing the web and online databases. How can you improve the discoverability of the journals you publish? During this session, Crossref’s Head of Partnerships Jennifer Kemp and Scholastica CEO and Co-founder Brian Cody will discuss:
  • Steps to assess your current article discovery status
  • Tips to enrich your article-level metadata for better indexing outcomes
  • Search engine optimization dos and don’ts

Not a Needle in a Haystack! Increasing Journal Discoverability

Presenter:

  • rachel lee, eScholarship Publishing, California Digital Library

Description:

The key goal of open access is the widest dissemination of research, unrestricted by a paywall. Simply making content freely available, however, does not guarantee a broad readership. Ensuring that articles are easily findable should be a necessary component of any OA journal’s long-term sustainability plan. With readers resorting to a small selection of search tools (Google Scholar, JSTOR, Web of Science, library finding aids), what steps must a journal take to ensure that it is ‘in the mix’ for researchers?

On a practical level, building out a discoverability strategy is a significant effort. Under-staffed and thinly-resourced journals may not be able to dedicate additional time to delving into the broader mechanics of discoverability and understanding reader behavior. So what can be done? 

While this session will ask more questions that it answers, its aim is to surface some of the unique challenges of discoverability for OA journals, to suggest some steps to take to increase visibility, and to discuss whether such activities can, or should, be scaled. 

Questions will include: Which are the most important discovery venues? Could these efforts be coordinated and scaled across multiple publishers or journals? Are there technical hurdles that can be overcome with best practices? 

The presentation will offer food for thought as well as practical steps to improving the discoverability of your journal content for researchers.