Metadata services

June 26, 2023 *

Metadata Services at ScienceOpen

As a publisher you may want to host the version of record of your articles and books on your own website or repository, but take advantage of the rich metadata creation and distribution capacities of a professional hosting platform. With ScienceOpen we can make that happen! Our Metadata Technical Hub will help you create and maintain high quality XML metadata, deposit rich data to Crossref, DOAJ and other services. Metadata services are are available for book, journal and conference content.

Each publisher brings their own specific metadata challenges and we have a technical team to work out the best solution for you. Regardless of which solution works best for you, your content will benefit from

Context: Embed your journals and books within the context of 86+ million records on ScienceOpen.
Innovation: ScienceOpen offers technology at the cutting edge of scholarly publishing, providing solutions for versioning, open peer review, data linking, open citations and more.
Community: Use ScienceOpen infrastructure to build communities around your books and journals. Users can share, recommend, comment, or review books and chapters.

To read a recent case study of a University Press we provided extensive metadata services to, go here.

Explore Collections of some of our metadata customers:

Example of a book record on ScienceOpen with complete metadata including editors, publication date, publisher, abstract, link to publisher page, and links to each chapter.

Key services of ScienceOpen’s Metadata Technical Hub

XML check for Journals, Books, Book chapters, Conference papers
DOI deposit with Crossref including key components such as:
- License Information
- Abstracts
- Affiliation information
- References/Open references
- ORCID IDs
- Funding
Long-term archiving – CLOCKSS
DOAJ deposit
Dissemination to A&I services
Google metatags – feed to Google Scholar

Key Services Explained

1. XML check and enhancement

ScienceOpen has developed a wide range of ways to introduce a publisher’s articles into the database with as little technical effort from the publisher as possible. Our goal with everyone we work with is to add the richest metadata possible about an article, or any publication record, to increase the chances that it will be found, read and recommended by the right researchers. Ideally, ScienceOpen works with XML metadata in Dublin Core, JATS or BITS DTD. However, we are capable of handling many different states of metadata, or lack of metadata, by tailoring our metadata services to each customer;s individual needs.

2. Crossref DOI deposit

Publishers who enhance their metadata on the ScienceOpen platform with abstracts, license info and more can opt to have us deposit that information at Crossref for more complete records for all metadata affiliates of the Crossref database. Crossref DOIs are essential to prevent information being lost from inactive URLs or “link rot” and to preserve the integrity of the scientific record. ScienceOpen saves publishers time by depositing content to Crossref – from first deposit to updating records to future content.

3. DOAJ article metadata deposit

For the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) we can offer a similar metadata delivery service. Many Open Access journals are rigorously vetted and finally accepted into DOAJ but do not have the technical capacity to deposit article-level metadata to the database. ScienceOpen can both add metadata from DOAJ, for those Open Access publishers who do not yet have Crossref DOIs for their content, and deposit article-metadata for journals that have been accepted into DOAJ. Each complete entry in a relevant database increases the discoverability of publisher content.

4. Machine-readable open access licenses

ScienceOpen is a good place to visualize how computers read and interpret publisher metadata – particularly relevant in the case of Open Access licenses. An “Open Access” filter on search results within the ScienceOpen discovery environment defines only those articles as Open Access which have a standard machine-readable license correctly tagged in the metadata. How does your favorite OA journal check out? If your Open Access symbol is missing, let us know and we can work together to understand and correct the problem.

5. Google Scholar indexing

Google Scholar requires a special set of metatags to be exposed to the search engine for efficient indexing. Not every website is immediately understood by the Google bots to contain academic content which can cause some journals to miss out on the powerful Google discovery channel. ScienceOpen works with Google Scholar to ensure that all hosted journals on ScienceOpen are instantly and correctly indexed according to Google’s requirements and that rich metadata for all our customers of advanced indexing services is correctly picked up.

6. Abstracting & indexing services

Once rich metadata is stored in the ScienceOpen database, we can package and digitally deliver it to a full range of A&I services. Beyond DOAJ, we currently have metadata delivery mechanisms in place for Dimensions, PubMedCentral and Scopus. We are happy to work with publisher customers to set up delivery plans for them.

7. Long-term archiving

It is not uncommon for journals to cease publishing after a time for a whole variety of reasons. In these cases, long-term archiving is essential to secure the digital scholarly record. For publishers hosting their full-text articles on the ScienceOpen platform, we provide long-term archiving with CLOCKSS to protect their content for future generations. We are also happy to deliver content to Portico or other archives.

If you would like to learn more about ScienceOpen metadata solutions and get a demo or a quote for your publications, please contact Stephanie Dawson or Stuart Cooper.