COPIM Publishers Workshop: Discovery & dissemination — the future | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs

by Lucy Barnes

In preparation for the workshop, we sent our participants a questionnaire to fill in as a basis for our discussions on the day.

Questions 3 and 4 looked at new ways of dissemination away from the traditional library supply chain, for example Amazon and Google.

The groups discussing questions 1 and 2 inevitably touched upon new and emerging routes to discovery too. This discussion has been included in the following sections.

We can get a little bit obsessed with library systems, but we need to remember that many people go to Google first. It was also noted that Amazon is very influential, but they use their own way of cataloguing and we are unsure if it abides to any standards. However, the biggest problem for OA monographs is that platforms such as Amazon are trade platforms and they want to sell the print (or digital) book, so there is no link to the OA editions. It appears that they scrap that part of the metadata. In fact, for some publishers who sell print on demand in addition to the OA version, the Amazon metadata will say not in stock or used.

There is also a link between the more traditional discovery platforms. Many academics might use Google and Amazon to aid discovery, however, in the early day of the JSTOR OA platform it was observed that there was a considerable number of users coming in from outside the institution. Therefore, the books reached beyond the academy.

The H-Net book announcement service was mentioned as something for COPIM to investigate further. Similarly we will need to look much closer to platforms such as EBSCO and Gobi to better understand how they receive, process, and output metadata, and how that influences monograph discoverability.

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