Discoverability and the Small Publisher: A Case Study from RTI Press

Digital publishing holds the promise of global dissemination of research findings. Small publishers, however, face numerous obstacles to making their publications discoverable: budget/personnel constraints, marketplace competition, a vast array of formats and types of metadata available, and so on. Where is a small publisher to start?

This poster summarizes RTI Press’s efforts to boost our discoverability. By looking at what worked and what didn’t work, we demonstrate how other small scholarly publishers can develop discoverability strategies and tactics that are cost-efficient, tailored to the appropriate audience, and effective. Since implementing these strategies, RTI Press had a 29% YOY increase in citations in fiscal year 2020 and a 32% increase in fiscal year 2021.

RTI Press is a global publisher of peer-reviewed, diamond open-access publications. We are also the small scholarly publishing arm of RTI International, our parent research institution. Because of our size, various institutional constraints, and the fact that we publish less traditional formats, we experience many of the obstacles small presses face in sharing their publications.

We used a twofold approach to investing in our discoverability. First, we made cultural investments: getting leadership buy-in, educating researchers, using researcher networks to promote publications, determining reader needs, and collaborating with our library services and corporate communications team. Second, we made technological investments by using analytics to determine our readers’ habits, improving our metadata, integrating additional metadata by using persistent identifiers and an institutional repository, indexing our publications where our readers can find them, and improving our website’s SEO.