Some indexes and aggregators will go ahead and include you without your having to do anything, especially as your journal becomes established. But as the publisher or editor of a journal, it’s important to be proactive to get the snowball really rolling and to ensure that you show up in as many points of discovery as possible.
Some metadata distribution is active on your part as a publisher. For example, you must register your publication to receive an ISSN, and apply for inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). On the article level, services like Crossref and indexes like DOAJ require publishers to submit robust metadata, either via a form or via upload of an XML file.
Check Ulrichsweb to see where your journal is already indexed, and reach out to indexes that are important in your field.
DOAJ has assumed an important place and takes on the role of a metadata hub, along with Crossref. Being included in indexes like DOAJ and Crossref is increasingly important because other providers and services draw on them by reusing the information they provide in their own products.
Adding certain metadata-related features to your journal’s website can help others gather and maintain information about your publication. This can be in the form of machine-readable metadata you provide, or following presentation best practices so that others can make quality metadata based on your journal website.
Some journal management systems and institutional repositories will embed structured information that can be crawled by search engines (such as Google Scholar). Including structured information in your webpages (specific and precise title tags, for example) helps adds data points to search engine indexes.
HTML meta tags are a common location for metadata in web pages. Here is an example of an article web page from the journal Boletín de Arte, which uses Open Journal Systems. You can see a lot of metadata in “meta” tags in the source HTML code.
Below you can see a snippet of JSON-LD from an article in the International Journal for Digital Art History, which uses schema.org fields (also called properties). Schema.org is highly preferred by search engines, which maintain the schema.
{
"@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "Article",
"author": "Dario Rodighiero",
"dateModified": "2022-07-21T15:51:47-0700",
"datePublished": "2022-07-21T15:44:49-0700",
"headline": "Extending Museum Beyond Physical Space: A Data-Driven Study of Aldo Rossi's Analogous City as a Mobile Museum Object",
"image": "http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d0e806114ec310001712792/5d4edb2e7db7530001bf83a9/62d9d49370490a71434e49aa/1658443907067/Rodighiero_Final_Version.jpg?format=1500w",
"name": "Extending Museum Beyond Physical Space: A Data-Driven Study of Aldo Rossi's Analogous City as a Mobile Museum Object — DAHJ",
"publisher": {
"@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "Organization",
"logo": {
"@type": "ImageObject",
"url": "https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d0e806114ec310001712792/t/61602e4529a141763214564a/1665133841560/"
},
"name": "DAHJ"
},
"url": "https://dahj.org/article/extending-museum-beyond-physical-space"
}
In addition to the machine readable metadata you make, information professionals create and maintain metadata for their systems based on how you present your journal on your own website and how you have registered your publication’s ISSN(s). Below are screenshots of records describing the journal Music in art: international journal for music iconography in Worldcat (a shared library catalog) and Ulrichsweb (a serials directory).
PIE-JWhile journal-level catalog records focus on the entire journal, past and present, many publisher websites emphasize the current journal issues or volumes. This can make it hard for information systems to link researchers to the right content. For example, one of the thorniest issues for libraries to deal with is when the title of a journal changes.
Maintained by NISO, the National Information Standards Organization in the United States, PIE-J: The Presentation & Identification of E-Journals outlines best practices for journal publishers. Following PIE-J will make it easier for information professionals to catalog and index your journal.