We are happy to announce the release of the BookMetaHub!
Two years ago we set out to build a metadata hub that publishers could use to create and enhance metadata for academic books to share widely for easy distribution and increased discoverability in digital environments. As a content aggregator, ScienceOpen experienced first-hand the challenges around integrating books into a discovery database.
So we were highly motivated to support publishers with the creation of rich book metadata and had many clever ideas of how the overall metadata richness at the record-level but also the interoperability could be improved—and we were just starry-eyed enough to kick off this project. Most importantly, we are thankful for the generous grant that the German Ministry of Education and Research awarded to us within their funding strategy for the transformation towards more Open Access within Germany who made this development work possible.
With the funding period coming to an end, it is time for a resume:
In 2021 we were awarded the BMBF grant and launched the new platform in Beta one year later with basic upload, enhance, and export functions. Since then we have been on a steep learning curve, not least thanks to our publishing partners willing to test and share feedback about the platform and its functionalities with us. Thanks to our partners and the support and essential input from our stakeholders and the various task groups around metadata best practices in book publishing, we were able to extend the platform’s features and improve overall user friendliness and usefulness throughout the course of this project—effectively making the hub an expedient solution for academic publishers to reduce redundancies in their workflows for metadata creation, maintenance, registration, and delivery.
So we are excited to announce the final release of our BookMetaHub and to take stock of its full functionality and latest additions here:
BookMetaHub – Reducing Redundancies in your Metadata Maintenance Workflows
The BookMetaHub was created as a free tool for academic book publishers to create or enhance their book and chapter records online via an easy-to-use interface. The export of their data, then fully upgraded in line with Best Practice recommendations for indexing in digital environments, in current standards of BITS XML or Crossref-compatible XMLs allows for easy (re)distribution to other third-party platforms, indexers, and content (re)registration.
For this we created an infrastructure on the hub where publishers can create their own designated workspace and invite colleagues to join them for co-working on the content with just a few clicks.
Via an editorial dashboard, already available content can be uploaded (e.g. via ONIX files or by querying metadata records of books and chapters that are registered under a Crossref or DataCite DOI) and imported directly to a designated publisher’s space, thus effectively reducing the time spent on data input on the side of the publisher.
Each book or chapter record can in turn be enhanced (or created from scratch) via our interface and exported on an article-level or in batch listing all essential details for indexing in a well-structured XML output to ensure effective and persistent connections within the digital landscape.
To put plainly, via the hub your academic content is easily maintained according to latest Best Practices and quickly (re)shared throughout the publication’s life cycle.
With the final release of our BookMetaHub we are proud to present an overview of the most crucial supported features and latest additions (*) here:
- DOI (Digital Object Identifier)
- Never lose sight. DOIs as persistent connection to your Version of Record help you keep track publications throughout their lifecycle of various formats, editions, versions, or platforms
- Import your records via simple DOI (list) upload, and export for easy (re)registration of your book and chapter DOIs and respective metadata details
- Chapter-DOIs – connected to book title
- Create chapter-DOIs and register full book sets at Crossref
- Browse chapter pages with rich metadata connected via a table of contents menu
- Chapter-DOIs as additional links back to your content
- Open Access licenses
- Select one of the Creative Commons licenses to make sure your content will be accessible to a wide audience and findings can be reused
- Machine-readability to guarantee Open Access publications will be detected across the landscape
- Translated titles and subtitles for your books and chapters
- Enrich your metadata and open it up to a broader multilingual audience
- Book- and Chapter-level abstracts, also with translations
- Provide essential context detail for researchers about the focus of study, also on the chapter-level
- Translate abstracts to reach different research communities, even locally
- Funding details – upgrade with FundRef IDs*
- Now implemented on the BookMetaHub is the Crossref Funder Registry, an open registry of grant-giving organization names and identifiers
- Via an easy form field, research and match funder details to include FundRef IDs and controlled funder vocabulary as part of your metadata deposits
- Add Award or Grant Numbers
- Institution/Affiliation – upgrade with ROR IDs*
- The Research Organization Registry (ROR), a global, community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research organizations now also implemented
- Via an easy form field, research and match ROR IDs to institutions and affiliations
- Add more insight to the context around a publication
- ORCID ID (authors/editors)
- Add persistent IDs for your authors – and make sure your authors will be uniquely identifiable
- Select BISAC codes for more context data*
- Simply select via a Human-readable dropdown list the best fit of BISAC subject categories
- All outputted in your XMLs in Human- and Machine-readable format
- Open references*
- Why keep them under wraps—increase your citation metrics instead by adding persistent reference details
- Share your reference data and get the full Crossref Citations data in return. Learn more about the Cited-by Service from Crossref here
- Simply upload a list of DOIs for your references and they will be neatly outputted as structured detail in the XML – no more OCR from PDFs
- Open Data Linking*
- Select the Data Availability statement and link it to your records for less redundancy, better reproducibility and increased transparency
- Open API*
- Export all book and chapter records (from your workspace) in one batch for easy sharing and redistribution
And lastly, we are excited to announce that we are currently setting up a new cooperation with the Thoth platform.
The team from Thoth and our own BookMetaHub developers have been working hard on a new interface implementation to create a more seamless communication between those two systems via a publisher-based setup. So wherever you start your metadata journey, you can easily share your data between the Thoth and BookMetaHub systems to continue working on your records for additional export formats in ONIX, MARC, JSON, KBART, or BITS and Crossref-XMLs. More details will follow shortly.
As the project development concludes we hope that this free tool will be widely used by the academic publishing community. We invite all publishers to continue to send us their feedback on the BookMetaHub.
ScienceOpen will continue to maintain and update the hub’s functions to ensure its effectiveness as a data maintenance tool for all academic publishers out there—now as well as in the future.