Since October 2015, the contents of the OAPEN Library have been indexed by Google Scholar; which was proudly announced by Francis Pinter. Today, Google Scholar lists over 36,000 books and chapters that can be found in the OAPEN Library. In the last year alone, over 2,800 titles were added. This is a huge success.
This number is so large because Google Scholar not just indexes books, it also identifies separate chapters published in edited volumes in the OAPEN Library. For instance, clicking on the chapter “De-globalisation, value chains and reshoring” or clicking on the chapter “Transformative paths, multi-scalarity of knowledge bases and Industry 4.0” both link to the same book in the OAPEN Library: http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/37355.
What have we done to optimize the OAPEN Library for Google Scholar? Starting November 2019 we had several discussions with colleagues at Google Scholar, resulting in updated specification for the metadata to be used in our new DSpace environment. Each landing page – which describes a book or a chapter – also contains machine-readable metadata. This metadata is read by the Google Scholar crawler.
It’s nice to see how this has worked out. For example, in the last 7 days (8 to 14 May) almost 17,500 people visited the OAPEN Library through Google Scholar. A result we are very happy with, and we plan to continue working with Google Scholar to optimise indexing.
Next, we will focus on optimizing Google Scholar setups for monographs versus edited volumes, which are handled differently by the indexing system.
