Improving global research discoverability and visibility through ScienceDirect

ScienceDirect, the Elsevier platform that is a leading source of scientific, technical, and medical research, has today published its ‘Expanded reach on a trusted platform’  report. The report is free to download and explores the initial results of ScienceDirect’s pilot initiative that enables researchers to search and discover articles from five publishing partners alongside content from Elsevier journals.

Since January 2022, American Chemical Society (ACS), the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), Taylor & Francis, and Wiley have made selected Organic Chemistry and Transportation research articles discoverable on ScienceDirect alongside Elsevier content. IUCr Journals, published by the International Union of Crystallography, joined the initiative in August 2022.

The report includes data on how research included in the pilot has been discovered and consumed, and insights from authors, readers, and librarians on how they perceive the collaboration. Key highlights include:

• 90% of ScienceDirect users think the pilot is a good idea.

• 73% of authors are either positive or very positive about their articles being shared in this way (20% are neutral).

• Individual journals included in the pilot saw increases of up to 18.8% in total reach for their research included in the initiative.

• Content in the pilot was more discoverable across a broader and more diverse geographic distribution: Pilot content saw 5% more visits from countries outside of North America and Europe (72%) in comparison to Elsevier organic chemistry content (67%).

The pilot will continue and be expanded beyond its initial scope of Organic Chemistry and Transportation content to cover additional research topics. American Society for Microbiology (ASM) and Brill will join the pilot and their research will be included on ScienceDirect in Spring/ Summer 2023, content from 36 journals will be added from both publishers.

Rose L’Huillier, SVP for Researcher Products at Elsevier, said: “While the pilot is still very new, we have produced this report as part of our commitment to keeping the research community updated on our progress. There is a lot more to do and understand, but we are pleased with the initial results. I’m delighted that ASM and Brill have chosen to take part, and we look forward to collaborating with them and our existing partners on how we can further improve global research discoverability and visibility for authors and help save readers’ time.”

During the pilot, researchers have been able to discover more than 100,000 articles from 38 industry-leading journals from the participating publishers, through search, recommendations, and browsing content. If an article is Open Access, the full text is available immediately in HTML. For all Open Access content and subscription content to which the user is entitled, researchers see a PDF button on ScienceDirect that indicates they have full-text access, which takes them to the PDF hosted on the publisher’s website. Entitled access is determined using GetFTR, a free-to-use solution for platforms like ScienceDirect that enables real-time entitlement checks for any article. More detail is available about the pilot here.

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