Metadata, indexing, distribution and reporting for every title.
Removing the paywall removes one obstacle; discovery is a separate matter, and it is built from the metadata and distribution work set out below.
Metadata and Identifiers
- DOIs at book and chapter level, registered with Crossref. Your third chapter is independently citable and independently findable by a reader who has never heard of the book.
- ORCID iDs for every author, editor and contributor, so the work attaches to your record automatically.
- Funder and grant identifiers via Crossref's Open Funder Registry, so your funder can see the output against the award and your research office can report it without chasing you.
- ROR identifiers for institutional affiliations.
- Abstracts and keywords at chapter level, plus BIC, BISAC and Thema subject classifications.
- ONIX metadata distributed to aggregators, library suppliers and retailers, and openly available to library systems.
Indexing and Aggregation
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and OAPEN: the central discovery routes for open-access books, and the route by which most libraries load them.
- Google Scholar and Google Books: full text exposed for indexing, at chapter granularity.
- WorldCat and national union catalogues.
- Citation indexes: every title is submitted to the book citation indexes in Web of Science and Scopus. Inclusion is their decision, not ours, and we do not claim otherwise.
- Subject platforms and aggregators where a title is eligible, including funder-mandated repositories such as PubMed Central Bookshelf and Europe PMC for Wellcome-funded work.
Libraries
- Free MARC records for every title, and KBART holdings files, so librarians can load our books without cataloguing them by hand.
- Supply to the main library discovery layers and knowledge bases.
- Notification to subject librarians in relevant fields.
- No licence to negotiate, no consortium deal, no access management. A library can simply add the record.
The Website Itself
Each book has a landing page with a full description, table of contents, chapter-level pages and abstracts, structured markup for search engines, and a permanent URL. The HTML edition means the text is indexed directly rather than sitting inside a PDF that a search engine reads badly.
Direct Promotion
- Review copies to relevant scholarly journals, and follow-up. Open-access books are frequently under-reviewed simply because nobody sent a copy.
- Announcements to our subscriber list, to relevant scholarly societies and mailing lists, and to the networks of the Advisory Board.
- Conferences in the book's field, with catalogue presence and flyers, and support for launch events you organise.
- Social and community channels, including the platforms where your subfield talks to itself rather than the ones with the largest numbers.
- Beyond the academy, where relevant: practitioner bodies, policy organisations, professional associations, NGOs and journalists. Conventional monograph publishing rarely attempts this.
What We Ask of You
Around three months before publication we ask authors for a short marketing questionnaire: the journals that should review the book, the societies and mailing lists that should hear of it, the conferences that matter, and the practitioners and organisations outside the academy who would use it. Authors know these networks better than any publisher.
Usage Reporting
You receive a usage report twice a year for the life of the book: downloads and views by format, chapter-level breakdown, geographic distribution, and referring sources, on a COUNTER-conformant basis where applicable. Citations and online mentions are reported where we can track them.
The geographic breakdown shows where a book is read, including countries whose libraries would not have bought a closed edition.