The academic research network ScienceOpen now adds books and book chapters to give users a richer discovery experience and to provide publishers and their authors with increased visibility and a new sales channel. Embedded within an interactive discovery environment of nearly 60 million article records, this new feature highlights books and chapters within search results and ScienceOpen’s unique Collection infrastructure. Publishers will be able to promote and sell their open access and copyrighted works within a broad, interdisciplinary research context.
ScienceOpen’s interactive user interface allows researchers to share and review books and chapters, and to curate them into topical Collections. Table of contents, linked citations, references, authors and keywords deeply connect the books to other content within the discovery environment, building a contextual cloud that encourages further exploration. A powerful example of how books may be highlighted within a certain subject can be found in the Collection “Climate Change: Open Access”. Interested readers are directed to the version of record on the publisher website – both for open access and copyrighted books. To make acquiring physical copies of books easier, a “Buy book” button has been added to all chapters and books on ScienceOpen and links to the publisher store.
CEO of ScienceOpen, Dr. Stephanie Dawson, said: “This new feature is a response to users and publishers seeking to highlight book content within their topical ScienceOpen Collections. Already 136 books and chapters have been added to researcher-edited Collections. We are pleased therefore to be able to open up this feature to academic publishers to promote and sell their academic book titles. For too long books and journal articles have been searchable in completely different databases. ScienceOpen is aiming for a unified approach to scholarly discovery.”
The academic book market is undergoing rapid changes with the move to digital and new open access models. By integrating book discovery into the platform, ScienceOpen strives to provide publishers with new marketing and sales channels for their book portfolios.