Discoverability in Academic Publishing – Finding the Golden Needle in the Haystack

The sheer volume of journal articles, research papers, and books (monographs, serials, series) published every year is overwhelming. Since the turn of the 20th century, the number of active peer review journals has expanded from less than 200 to over 28,000! According to the Global STM report (Mark Ware, Michael Mabe, 2015):

"There were about 28,100 active scholarly peer-reviewed English-language journals in late 2014 (plus a further 6450 non-English-language journals), collectively publishing about 2.5 million articles a year. The number of articles published each year and the number of journals have both grown steadily, for over two centuries, by about 3% and 3.5% per year respectively."

Bibliometric analysts Lutz Bornmann and Ruediger Mutz have calculated that the actual rate of expansion is nearer to 9% each year, which represents a doubling of global scientific output every nine years!

The range of research outlets is also increasing every year, with an ever growing number of commercial, institutional and non-profit repositories. Given this large volume of academic output, how are the users of this content to find what they need?

Search engines: To facilitate the search for content, ever more powerful search engines have been developed, such as BASE, CiteULike, Google Scholar and the Library of Congress Search Engines, among others.

Content Taxonomies: Taxonomy refers to the practice and science of classification of things or concepts. Taxonomy facilitates internal processes such as content management, as well as externally-facing features such as navigation, search, and customization. Given the expanding volume of academic content, the need to organize and classify this content has become essential.  There are many nationally focused categorization systems of particular relevance to the academic book industry, such as BISAC (North America), BIC (UK), CLIL (France), WGS (Germany). In the US, there are several comprehensive academic discipline classification taxonomies, such as those developed by the National Academy of Science and the Library of Congress. Recently, the organization ‘Thema’ has made advances in standardizing and merging these national classification systems. Of course, the use of these taxonomies is dependent upon the ability to accurately tag content according to the appropriate content taxonomy descriptions.

Format types: Academic content users are becoming ever more demanding in terms of the format in which their content is delivered. Journal content is now essentially digital, given the limitations associated with searching and storage of hard copy content. The eBook was initially seen as a replacement of the printed book; however, recent trends indicate that while eBook sales have grown considerably in the last decade, more recently they have witnessed a slight decline compared to print book sales. Additionally, new types of eBook readers as well as Text-to-Speech readers, are being introduced to accommodate individuals with visual impairments, in compliance with the recent ADA act.

Other forms of Classification: The recent trend towards Open Access has led many academics to avoid content published behind paywalls, given the ever increasing prices that commercial publishers are charging. Adding to this trend, many national funding agencies (e.g. UKRC, Horizon 2020) require that those receiving funds disseminate their content via Open Access. It is important that Open Access content be identified as such, and that it be accurately tagged to ensure that it is both compatible with existing standards, and consistent and machine-readable.

In addition, many content users wish to be informed of the Peer Review status of the content they are accessing, as well as the type of peer review that has been conducted (double blind, single blind, open, collaborative). Likewise, Peer Review may be unnecessary or irrelevant for certain types of content and should be identified as such.

Glasstree and discoverability: Glasstree will eventually publish all forms of academic content. In its initial stages of development and testing, it will focus on hardcopy books and eBooks. It has been developed to facilitate discovery, both from the standpoint of the content generator, who wants his/her content to be found, as well as the content user, who wishes to minimize the time needed to discover the appropriate content.

Glasstree includes the following content discovery features:

• Content will be organized in a taxonomy based on the National Academy of Sciences, interlinked with BISAC coding, allowing authors to classify their content to the third level (e.g. Life Sciences > Microbiology > Virology);
• Content will indicate the type of Peer Review that has been conducted (double blind, single blind, open, collaborative, none);  
• Product types: Various Print options will be supported as well as eBooks;
• Format: Monograph, textbook, handbook, dissertation or thesis, case study, conference proceedings, serial/series, etc.
• Open Access and Licensing: Glasstree will provide the opportunity for authors to identify their content as being Open Access or not, making a wide variety of intellectual property licensing options available, including a comprehensive list of Creative Commons license options.

To facilitate the discoverability of your next publishing project, visit www.glasstree.com where your readers will discover your ‘golden needle’ in the ever-expanding academic ‘haystack’.