Welcome to the December Ingenta news update – the latest edition of our regular bulletin that is designed to provide a quick-to-read summary of the latest developments here at Ingenta Connect, Ingenta Open and Ingenta CMS. In this month’s edition:
For questions about any aspects of our service to you, or any suggestions for new features or services, please contact your Account Manager or contact me, Head of Ingenta Connect – byron.russell@ingenta.com
And so the year draws to a close, with the holidays just a few weeks away and the streets full of lights and decorations. I hope it’s been a great year for you. It’s certainly been one of change, with Open Access increasingly moving mainstream and the introduction of controversial initiatives like Plan S and GDPR.
We have introduced a number of new initiatives of our own, introducing new features such as ReadSpeaker, Hypothes.is and Dimensions, and launching a whole new platform – Ingenta Open – built on our hugely successful Ingenta CMS. ORCIDs are now a feature on Ingenta Connect – just include ORCID metadata in your feed, and we can display the references – and we have a new Content tracker, making it easier to find the status of your publications. And last, but by no means least, we have run a whole year of highly popular webinars, free to Ingenta publishers and librarians. A few of the highlights, now available on our YouTube Channel in case you missed them, are:
For more, just visit the Ingenta YouTube channel. There will be another series of webinars next year, including these – just watch your inbox for joining details:
With all of your Ingenta team, I wish you a relaxing holiday to come, and a very successful publishing year in 2019,
Byron Russell
Head of Ingenta Connect & Ingenta Open
Rachael Lammey explains what Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are and how they help the research community
It can be easy to forget that DOIs haven’t been around forever. In fact, it can even be easy to to forget that they are around at all – in scholarly publishing we often tend to take them for granted when using them to find relevant research quickly and easily. However, having identifiers for publications (and more) is really important, as is the metadata registered with those identifiers that makes them do their job.
People can sometimes get a little intimidated by the concept of metadata. When we talk about metadata at Crossref we mean information related to the piece of content: publication, title, authors, publication dates, ORCID iDs, funder information, current location of the work (URL), license information, references etc. This information, coupled with the DOI (another piece of the metadata) helps uniquely identify the piece of content to help it be discovered and used.
Publishers started to work with DOIs in a collaborative way by founding Crossref in 2000. With the acceleration of online publishing, organizations were finding that using URLs as links between research didn’t work in the long-term – those links would break and hamper the progress of researchers trying to find the information they needed. Publishers also needed to be able to find a means to support a central, collaborative reference linking service, so that they did not need to sign individual contracts with every other publisher to agree to link out to their publications via the reference list/bibliography section of their articles.
Crossref was established as a not-for-profit membership organization to provide a solution to these issues. As such, there are a number of aspects to Crossref membership. Organizations join to take advantage of our Content Registration service, registering metadata and DOIs with us uniquely identify a piece of content, and to let the world know that it exists. They also agree to participate in collaborative reference linking – searching for and linking out to articles using the DOI from their reference lists, without having to create multiple bilateral agreements with other publishers in order to do so.
The DOI is a better tool than a URL to create this linking infrastructure because it is a persistent identifier—a life-long reference—that specifies the content of an online object, not the location. This means it remains associated with the object, irrespective of changes to the object’s web address. The DOI is associated with a URL, and can be updated centrally so the DOI also goes to the current location of the content.
That central updating happens through Crossref for Crossref-registered DOIs (it’s worth nothing that there are other DOI registration agencies). If an organization’s content moves to a new online location, which happens more frequently than you’d think, they will come to Crossref and update URLs associated with their content in our database. That one central update means that anyone linking to the publisher content using that DOI will be automatically directed to the content in its new location, making it much easier to follow the thread of research and see how ideas have developed and changed over time.
It’s more than just other publishers using these identifiers and metadata however. This information is used by thousands of third-party tools and services who use or help others use research. These include library discovery systems, content aggregators, hosting providers (like Ingenta), scholarly sharing networks, metrics and analytics companies, authoring tools and more. As an example, if you’re writing a paper in an authoring tool, it’s useful to be able just enter the DOI of a work you’re citing and have the tool enter the rest of the information about that work to your reference list. It saves time and increases accuracy. Equally, metrics tools need a way to accurately identify a piece of content long-term so that they can track the activity around it, so the DOI and its related infrastructure help them do that.
Image: Metadata users and their uses
And persistent identifiers aren’t just for journal articles – books, preprints, peer reviews, conference proceedings and more can all be registered with Crossref. Basically anything that would need to be cited consistently over time. It’s also international, with member organizations from over 118 countries registering their content. This helps these tools and services too as they need only come to one place to get information on over 100 million publications, rather than having to go to each publisher individually.
All of this helps us work towards our mission. We aim to make content easy to find, cite, link and assess. This is done through identifiers, metadata and the hard work of our members and the organizations that work together with them to help communicate research.
Back in April this year, the British Small Animal Veterinary Association (BSAVA) launched their new library site using Ingenta CMS. The BSAVA Library provides a resource enabling veterinary staff to discover all of their content, including book chapters, hundreds of hours of lecture recordings from their annual Congress, articles from Companion, drug dosages from the BSAVA Small Animal Formulary and much more. It also ensures that access is always there when it is needed – no more hunting for the practice copy of a particular manual.
The BSAVA Library is a great showcase of Ingenta CMS functionality. Designed to be simple and intuitive it boasts a clean user interface with responsive design so that it can be accessed on the go. Items within the library have been ‘tagged’ to help users easily find material by clinical topic, animal, or content that is aimed at a particular audience.
One key measure of successful implementation is the end user experience. BSAVA reached out to its user base to find out how the new resource is being used. Here are a couple of the responses:
“I’ve grown up with BSAVA manuals from seeing practice as a schoolboy, through undergraduate studies and into my working life. ‘The manuals’ have been a constant companion for reference and support. Their clear and concise layout lends them to being the ‘go to’ quick reference during a busy consulting session.
In my role within practice I was asked to appraise the practice library which revealed titles that were often dog eared, out of date or missing in action. As a growing practice with 9 sites purchasing a new set of physical BSAVA manuals was cost prohibitive. Add to this the issue that only one person can use a book at one time and books having the habit of growing legs and wandering off, a better solution was sought.
Through my BSAVA volunteering role, I was aware of the digitisation of the manuals. When the BSAVA Library went live my first feeling was that this could be a replacement for our paper resources in the practice.
I consulted the practice team on the range of titles that we wanted and liaised with the BSAVA team in Woodrow House. Once we had supplied the practice IP addresses we were up and running with the minimum of fuss. Now the entire team has 24 hour access from our sites to the manual series via our web browsers. The titles are fully searchable and it is really easy to quickly pull together information on a specific subject from across a number of titles.
From an administrative point of view, I can generate reports that allow me to see which titles staff are requesting that we don’t currently have. This allows me to see where demand within the clinic teams and which titles to purchase next. Feedback has been extremely positive with all staff that have used the resource and it has proven to be an extremely cost effective way to provide reference materials for the practice.”
A recent graduate commented;
“The BSAVA library has been very beneficial to me in small animal practice. The library allows me to search for manual chapters, articles and podcasts for specific conditions or procedures, ensuring that I have the latest information available at the click of a button. By having online access, I am able to access these resources regardless of which branch I am located. I can quickly use search functions to find specific information chapters rather than having to scan pages, saving me time in practice. The ease of searching by species or topic ensures that I can target my searches to my clinical cases or my interests. On the whole, I find the BSAVA library ensures I can access a wider range of resources with more ease in busy clinics.”
If you are interested in knowing more about the BSAVA library please contact Ian Mellor, i.mellor@bsava.com or for more information on Ingenta CMS, please contact your account manager.
You no doubt appreciate the benefits Ingenta Connect and Ingenta CMS provide publishers and libraries in delivering content to your audiences. However you may not be aware that Ingenta produces products and services which reach different audiences and a wide range of industries and sectors.
Ingenta Open is a growing open access platform which, as the name suggests, is a free to read resource for all researchers and hosting solution for open access publishers. Ingenta CMS customers benefit from a wider discovery reach by their open access content being indexed on Ingenta Open as well as their own dedicated website. Please contact us to learn more.
Managing intellectual property is a complex process and the Ingenta Commercial product suite streamlines publishers workflows and makes intellectual property management much simpler. The Commercial suite comprises 3 core modules:
1. Contracts Rights & Royalties (CR&R)
2. Content Lifecycle Manager (CLM)
3. Order to Cash (O2C)
Each module can be purchased and implemented individually or all as a comprehensive suite. Being content agnostic, the solution supports journal, book, music, digital media formats and more. The suite helps manage copyright compliance and facilitates the full product lifecycle from ideation through contract management to order fulfilment and cash collection. The Ingenta Aperture portal enables your trusted 3rd parties to access information in your system and can aid authors, contributors, representatives or customers.
Ingenta Advertising is a browser-based multimedia advertising platform that helps manage advert placements, Sponsored ETOC, Commercial Article Reprints and event billing. Ingenta Audience helps with audience profiling. This GDPR compliant system helps publishers to better understand their audience characteristics, enabling more targeted content to be served and enriching the readers experience.
Ingenta have also recently introduced platforms which support news organisations. Ingenta Editorial is an all in one editorial, digital asset management and cross channel publishing platform which helps consolidate news items and deliver content across multiple channels. ‘Fake news’ can damage organisation reputations and Truly helps verify the source of news stories, to prevent incorrect news from being broadcast.
Sadly the Ingenta Webinar on Open Access scheduled for 14 November had to be postponed, due to unforeseen circumstances. The free Open Access webinar raised a lot of interest and we had many people registered for it. The webinar was intended to discuss Open Access, the sustainability of it as a business model and question whether everything is really free and can be used, reused and shared. Our guest presenter was Eelco Ferwerda, director of OAPEN, one of Europe’s leading experts on the OA ecosystem.
We aim to reschedule the webinar at the beginning of next year and recommend you visit the Ingenta events page for any updates. We will also keep you updated on webinars if you subscribe for our newsletter and will provide updates via twitter @WeAreIngenta. We apologise for any inconvenience it caused.
Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are special strings of alphanumeric characters that form a persistent link to individual publications. They are issued at the time of publication, much like an ISBN or a serial number. DOIs are bound to metadata about the content object, such as a URL, indicating where it can be found. But what is their real value, and why should you, as a publisher, engage with them?
Guest Presenter: Rachel Lammey, Head of Community Outreach at CrossRef. Rachael worked as publishing manager with Taylor & Francis before joining Crossref in 2012. REGISTER FOR WEBINAR HERE.
One of the most important decisions any academic publisher has to make is that of the publishing platform the company is going to use to market its content. There are a number of key requirements any content management system wil need to be able to deliver, reliably and on budget. Rowland Conway, Director for Content Products at Ingenta, will discuss the relevant merits of platform types and the kinds of questions a publisher needs to ask to make an informed choice.
Presenter: Rowland Conway, Director, Ingenta Content Products. REGISTER FOR WEBINAR HERE.
A collaboration of the world’s leading academic publishers and research libraries, CLOCKSS provides a sustainable dark archive to ensure the long-term survival of Web-based scholarly content. The sheer weight of content the CLOCKSS archive deals with is staggering – 30 million journal articles, 75,000 books, 260 participating publishers and over 300 supporting libraries. In this webinar CLOCKSS Executive Director Craig Van Dyke will talk about the unique features of CLOCKSS and why archiving is more essential than ever.
Guest Presenter: Craig Van Dyck, Executive Director at CLOCKSS. REGISTER FOR WEBINAR HERE.
SciencePod provides a writing, editing, publishing and distribution service to science publishers to help them widely raise the profile of the research they publish, deploying an extensive network of highly talented and multilingual science writers from across Europe to translate complex scientific and technical concepts into simple language. In a new era of scientific publishing, where open access and notions such as citizen science have gained real political weight, the service SciencePod offers can make a real difference to discovery and usage.
Guest Presenter: Brett Freeman, Senior Vice President, EMEA at SciencePod. REGISTER FOR WEBINAR HERE.
We hope you can join us!