What is the “Scientific Cloud for Books”?

Books, while representing a fundamental resource for the dissemination of knowledge and the advancement of academic careers, have remained on the edge of the digital revolution that has involved other forms of scientific literature, such as scientific journals.

Firenze University Press has created the "FUP Scientific Cloud for Books" initiative to enhance the ecosystem surrounding high-quality scientific books, filling the existing gap with journals and taking full advantage of digital tools. Ensuring greater visibility and impact to monographs and collective volumes is the main goal of the Scientific Cloud which provides the scholar community with new and more efficient tools for publishing research results.

Using a cloud of metadata, the Scientific Cloud describes in a systematic and comprehensive way all the key aspects of the scientific book: authorship, evaluation process, publication formats, dissemination tools, as well as access modes and data recording of its impact. In other words, the creation, evaluation, dissemination, and conservation of a book are no longer complementary elements, but attributes that certify its value and quality. Thus all the crucial characteristics of a volume are appropriately described and easily accessible to researchers, research institutions, evaluation panels for competitive projects, public funders and, more generally, to the whole community of students and readers.

The Scientific Cloud allows FUP to fulfil its role as a non-profit "Public Publisher", offering authors and scholars an open and inclusive publishing environment, with sustainable business models and adopting copyright policies that enable access to research content to everyone. Since we encourage an equal participation to and distribution of knowledge, it is natural to adopt Open Access as the main tool for disseminating research and assessing its impact in terms of views and downloads through certifiable standards.

What is “Scientific Cloud for Books”?

Although the content, created by an Author or a group of Authors, is the heart of each monograph, we should not ignore that every volume benefits from the intervention of other actors: it is selected by an Editor, discussed with the Series Director, evaluated by a Scientific Board and certified through a peer review process.

The FUP Scientific Cloud for Books project, adopting appropriate editorial practices and specific metadata, captures these fundamental aspects of the book and creates next-generation digital editions capable of increasing the diffusion and impact of monographs, certifying the process and the referees involved in each phase.

In a communicative landscape in which metadata and the dissemination of scientific discoveries go hand in hand, metadata actually become key factors for the success of a publication.

Each volume present in the FUP catalogue is characterized by the following editorial best practices related to the four main areas of a publication:

Authorship:

• All the authorial components of a volume are identified by a well-defined set of metadata. This means that the Authors of books or books chapters and the Editors of a volume are systematically described using simple but effective metadata: name/surname, affiliation, nationality, ORCID, e-mail (Authors List).

Peer Review:

• Each volume clearly reports the characteristics of the evaluation process to which it was subjected. Each book and volume includes the link to the Referees List of the Publishing House posted on the site (Referees List), to the composition and Members of the FUP Series Scientific Board (Scientific Boards Members), to the editorial best practices applied in the evaluation process (Ethics Policy, Peer Review Policy,Open Access, Copyright and Licensing Policy, FUP Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing).

Publishing Formats:

• To increase both discoverability of every Author and the dissemination and impact of each research product, all miscellaneous volumes are also published as individual book chapters. Furthermore, all volumes adopt the best international standards in scholarly publishing which include the attribution of the DOI registration for books and book chapters, ISBN registration for books and attribution of an ISSN to series, and encourage Authors and Publishers to provide an ORCID code. Finally, books and book chapters are published in multi-format digital editions (PDF, epub, html or xml) as well as printed copy, with particular attention to machine-readable formats that are functional both to machine learning (IR) processes and to dissemination processes via indexes and aggregators.

Access, Dissemination and Impact:

• Open Access : the open access digital edition is the privileged, even if not exclusive, form of publication. FUP fully supports Open Access publishing as the primary tool to share ideas and knowledge in all disciplines with an open, collaborative and non-profit approach. Open Access books and book chapters allow the research community to achieve wide and rapid dissemination in all book formats, as well as a high impact of their research. All FUP content and metadata are published in Open Access, released under Creative Commons licensees stating the Author as the copyright holder (Open Access Policy).
• Dissemination : to increase discoverability, access and share of scientific research, FUP endeavours an ongoing activity of indexing its books and book chapters in dedicated platforms for dissemination, discovery and preservation. At the same time, FUP supports and encourages research libraries, as much as profit and not-for-profit indexing services, to list its series, books and book chapters among their electronic resources. All book metadata are openly available for download in various formats by any indexing service (Distributions, Indexing and Abstracting Policy).
• Impact : for each book and book chapter published, FUP processes and makes available to the Author periodically updated access statistics for views and downloads according to the standards currently used in the positioning and evaluation processes (The COUNTER Code of Practice for Release 5).

FUP Scientific Cloud for Books in Numbers

Published by FUP
CC BY 4.0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/fup_best_practice.2