Digital publishing presents many opportunities for academic journals to improve the way they make articles and key publication details available to authors, readers, and reviewers. By breaking free from the constraints of print page layouts, online journals can make their content more engaging and help website visitors find what they’re looking for faster. Online publishing also brings opportunities for journals to show how their articles relate to existing scholarly content on the web, which can improve the reading experiences of both human scholars and search engine web crawlers.
At Scholastica, we’re working to help open access journals harness the powers of the internet with beautiful website designs and features to make articles more discoverable in online searches. This month, we released two new features for our Open Access Publishing Platform users and journals using Scholastica’s Production Service:
- Custom journal website pages
- Google Scholar links in the references of HTML articles (when hosted via Scholastica)
In this post, we overview how you can start taking advantage of these features and the benefits. Read on for the details!
Add a custom page to your journal website
One of the biggest benefits of online publishing for journals is the ability to present information about different aspects of their publication more clearly. Well-laid out journal websites make it easy for readers, submitting authors, and reviewers to find the information they’re looking for. We know that some journals have different information that they need to highlight on their website, so we’ve added a new feature to make that easier.
Now, journals publishing with Scholastica’s Open Access Publishing Platform will have the ability to add a custom page to their publication website, such as a page for:
- Reviewer responsibilities
- Publisher/sponsor information
- Information about a recurring conference the journal is affiliated with
You can easily request to have a custom page added to your journal’s website by following the steps in this help document. We’ll add the page to your journal account so you can easily edit it with the rest of your website pages.
Google Scholar links in the references of HTML articles (when hosted via Scholastica)
We’ve also added a new feature for journals using Scholastica’s Production Service with our OA hosting platform. Now, all typeset HTML articles hosted via Scholastica will include Google Scholar links for articles in the references section as shown above. The benefits of this are twofold for journals. First, it means readers will easily be able to navigate to the Google Scholar pages of the research referenced in your articles. It also means your journal website will be in a better position to be crawled by search engines and show up in search results.
In order to return relevant search results, web crawlers for search engines like Google rely in part on the links embedded within a webpage to determine how the page relates to different content online. Academic journal articles tend to have very few links in the text, which can make it harder for search engines to know which content they’re associated with and, as a result, can hinder their search ranking. By adding Google Scholar links to all references in articles typeset by Scholastica, we’re helping search engine crawlers “see” how new articles relate to existing content online so they can more easily serve up those articles for related search queries.
We hope you find these new features useful! As always, if you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact us!
