Book Metadata for an Open Access World : Open Metadata-Management for Scientific Book Publications

The advantages and requirements of digital aggregation often run into a wall with scientific book publications. Standard metadata formats such as MARC and ONIX were developed to serve a different purpose – describing books for library cataloguing or sales, but not originally intended as a primary source for indexing in a digital research environment. Consequentially, book records tend to lack in detail required for proper description in an electronic research landscape. Recognized essentials in journal publishing such as a link to the (single digital) publisher’s version of record, DOIs registered with a rich, reusable metadata set listing keywords and subjects, affiliations or biographical information, machine-readable licenses, ORCID and FundRef IDs are seldomly available when it comes to books. With a grant from the German Ministry for Education and Research ScienceOpen has just launched the BookMetaHub, freely accessible to publishers around the world, that will provide them with the means to maintain metadata more easily and support them to better integrate books and chapters into to the digital knowledge graph.