“To speed up the transformation to Open Access (OA), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) will be funding 20 innovative projects over the next two years. We are proud to announce that ScienceOpen is participating with a project around Open Access book metadata for increased discoverability, and we would like to give a preview here of what we are working on.

As the ecosystem of book publishing continues to adhere more to traditional print processes, the industry’s infrastructures are developing new ways to improve the discovery and visibility of academic books content.

While publishers have been looking into additional outlets and platforms to represent, promote, or sell their print and e-publications portfolio, librarians and service providers are making great advances to overhaul their (e-)catalogues and databases. However, much of the book and monograph output still could do with a little boost in visibility and simplified communication between various the systems and platforms. OA books are essential for the transformation of the whole scholarly landscape, and one of the greatest advantages of open access for monographs is full, immediate accessibility. But even those sometimes suffer from a lack of available digitalized bibliographic data. Thus, discoverability of OA books can be lower because of missing metadata or due to missing portability and interoperability based on an incompatibility of formats or plain differences in requirements that prevent uptake in library catalogues and search portals or databases. In a nutshell: Books that cannot be found cannot be read….”