In general a publisher needs to meet the following standards to be included in LibKey and BrowZine.
- The publisher must create and distribute metadata as part of their publication process through CrossRef. We ingest this metadata from all of our supported publishers, then normalize it on our servers to provide the uniform display of journals in BrowZine.
- The publisher must assign a permanent linking structure to their articles. This ensures that links to full text remain durable over time.
- The publisher must include issue and/or volume enumeration in their metadata. This data is key for display and linking purposes in LibKey and BrowZine.
Most major academic publishers create and distribute article metadata through organizations such as CrossRef and assign durable links to their articles using DOIs to facilitate scholarly communication. Some smaller publishers or independent titles may not do so and cannot be included.
Publishers of non-scholarly materials such as popular magazines, newspapers, trade publications or blogs generally do not participate in the scholarly communication process and, as a result, we cannot currently support these titles in LibKey or BrowZine.
A publisher's website must also meet some very basic technical requirements such as providing articles in HTML or PDF format and supporting remote access using IP authentication or other remote access technologies.
Publisher Metadata Standards
In order for a publication's data to be ingested in BrowZine in particular, the article metadata must either be grouped into:
- Volumes & Issues (most popular)
- Volumes only (with the number of articles per volume being ~100 or less)
- Issues only (with the number of articles per volume being ~100 or less)
If your publication currently features a "continuous publishing" style, we highly recommend simply grouping things into "issues" in the CrossRef metadata that adheres to months (for example, Volume 14, Issue 10 would be the 14th year of publication of the title and the "October" issue). This will typically allow the number of articles per "issue" to be around 100 or less and works well for most publications. This follows precedence set by major international publishers. This also has the benefit of being able to group articles within a publisher's own page in a more convenient manner and increase discoverability.
If you're curious about a specific publisher, you can review our article on supported publishers. You can also feel free to contact us with questions on specific journals or publishers or our publisher metadata standards.