I'm a publisher

We would like to share research from our journals and ebooks on Zotero. But do we have any doubts:

It is possible?
Do you generate metrics?
Can any reader have access to our research? Or just registered users?
Do you do free API integration?
We use OJS system, is any integration possible?
  • edited January 20, 2022
    If you properly and completely include each published article's metadata and abstract into your OJS system, all users of Zotero will be able to (with one click in their web browser) be able to import the articles' metadata and abstract into their database. Zotero has a "translator" that allows users to easily capture articles published in OJS journals from the publisher's website. If your journal(s) are open access and you use OJS to provide a pdf file of your article, Zotero will also capture that full-text file if the reader wants to download it. If subscription is required and the Zotero user is within an institution that holds a subscription, the user will have access to the pdf file.

    I use Zotero to capture metadata of selected articles from several journals using the OJS system. Except for a single OJS journal that inconsistently enters their author name metadata, I find the OJS metadata as accurate and complete as or better than that from some well-known large publishers.

    Please provide each author's full name (not just a last name and initials) with the last name in a last name field and the given, middle, and other names in the given name field. Do not distinguish author family names by using all-upper-case characters.

    Likewise, article titles should _not_ be in all upper case.

    Please provide the language using ISO 639-1 codes (en =English, de =German, etc.)

    Please provide at least one journal ISSN or eISSN with each article record. If you have both a print and electronic ISSN please separate them with a comma-space or semicolon-space. Librarians in the USA will love you if you use a hyphen after the first four numbers of the ISSN.

    I don't recall if the standard OJS fee includes DOI assignment. If not, please consider paying an additional fee to have DOIs assigned to each of your articles.

    If you have beginning and ending page numbers for your articles be sure to include both beginning and ending page numbers with your metadata. Although the journals of some professional disciplines (law, engineering) typically only provide the beginning page number, when those articles are cited in manuscripts targeted to other disciplines, the journal submission guidelines and style guides require both beginning and ending page numbers.

    If instead of page numbers you assign an article number, please include the article number in the page field. My own preference is for the article number to be preceded with an "e" to make it clear that the number refers to an article that could have more than a single page. (Use any alphabetical character or characters you wish.)
  • So, as a publisher do we need to import articles into Zotero?

    Would zotero be an academic community that would allow different people to meet and contribute to the authors of the articles?

    As a publisher, can we have access to citation, reading or download metrics for our files?

    Is there any Zotero plugin that captures the files automatically?

    We always issue the DOI of our papers.
  • edited January 20, 2022
    Please take some time to read about Zotero from the website. Zotero functions as a tool for researchers and writers. Publishers gain from writers' ability to easily and correctly cite publications.

    Zotero does not actively provide anything _to_ publishers, metrics or otherwise. "Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help [individuals] collect, organize, cite, and share research."

    When an individual visits your website, if it adheres to recognized standards (properly using the OJS and having a DOI), Zotero will allow anyone to import your metadata to their Zotero personal database library. No 'plug-in' is necessary. And, if you at least provide the metadata in the format I mentioned above, the Zotero user can properly cite your publications with little or no editing of their records of your article metadata. This benefits publishers by increasing the likelihood that impact measurement services will recognize that your article has been cited. It benefits you because some indexing services ( IMEMR, Lilacs, SafetyLit), use Zotero as a front-end to selectively identify, import, and (as necessary) edit published journal articles' metadata before bring the publication into the database. This to allow people who search these databases by author or topic to reach articles on your website.
  • Understand. Thank you for your attention. I want to implement Zotero for our journals. So what would be the first step? Would there be a need for some plugin for OJS in order to export the files?

    As I said, we use OJS and output the DOI of articles.
  • Zotero should work out of the box with OJS with no need to do anything. If you find that's not the case, post a URL for one of the articles in the journal here and we'll take a look.
  • This is the link to one of our magazines: https://www.periodicojs.com.br/index.php/hs

    What do I need to do to start sending metadata to Zotero?
  • edited January 20, 2022
    See what @adamsmith said above. Your metadata with its flaws is already easily available to Zotero users from your journal websites.

    Let us not pretend to be anonymous now that you have identified yourself to be Periodicojs Academic Publisher. I can be specific in my remarks concerning the quality of your metadata. Please do not provide your articles in all upper case characters. Instead please use what English language librarians and indexers call "sentence case". That is, the first word and all 'proper nouns' are in upper case characters while everything else is in lower case. Please follow the example of many other publishers that use article numbers instead of pagination to add the article number to your pagination field in both your OJS and DOI record.


    edit: one thing more please do not use two colons (::) to separate your titles from subtitles. That practice can likely confuse some of the Zotero scripts that format your metadata to conform to requirements of citation style guides and standards such as APA, Chicago, Vancouver, etc. Other bibliography managers will likely have the same issue with your use of "::".


    I have used Zotero to import articles from your Health and Society to the SafetyLit database. I know that volunteers with LILACS have done the same. You need to do nothing further to make your material fully accessible to Zotero users. There is no need or option to send metadata to Zotero. There is no need to send metadata to LILACS or to SafetyLit. Volunteers from these databases capture your metadata automatically from your existing website.

    Your Health & Society journal requires considerable hand-editing of its metadata to make it suitable to index in the SafetyLit database and my colleague volunteers with LILACS have the same problem.

    See your journal information page on SafetyLit at:
    https://www.safetylit.org/week/journalpage.php?jid=28109

    Follow the link to see the articles that are indexed. Please not the differences between the metadata provided in the database version of your articles (that has been improved by hand edits) versus the metadata you provide to DOI and via the OJS system.
  • edited January 20, 2022
    One more request:

    I have for the first time looked at the pdf versions of your articles and note that the "print" version of your articles have assigned beginning and ending page numbers. It is essential that you include this in your OJS and DOI metadata records.

    I and other indexers will never make the effort to individually open each of your article PDFs to hand-capture your pagination.

    edit: in case that you read my comment above before I edited to remark on your use of "::" as a separator, please read it now.

    A common topic when indexers talk among themselves is the question, "Is the publishers' content worthy of the hand editing effort needed to properly index the article or should these publishers' material be indexed with the fatal flaws as they exist. If a publisher essentially doesn't care that their metadata conforms to standards should the indexer presume that the publisher doesn't care that their content has value.

    /ranting ended with my apologies to the Zotero community
  • Thanks for your attention. We apologize for the inconvenience and need for adjustments. As this is our first contact, we are now updating ourselves on the platform and settings. Could you cite an example of a journal that has followed these standards that you mentioned? Because we can take them as an example.

    Some of the adjustments you mentioned are routine practices that we have here in Brazil, so we can adjust to the standard you mentioned for the next editions.

    Thanks for the team's attention
  • Just to be clear, @adamsmith nor I are employees of Zotero. adamsmith is a very active volunteer who works with aspects of programming citation styles and other important things. I'm merely a user of Zotero who is responsible for a bibliographic database that uses Zotero as a "front end".

    I don't myself use OJS so I cannot offer advice concerning how to do things with the platform. Mainly, I request that you format article titles so that they are not in all caps and that you provide the article pagination to OJS and DOI.
  • Thanks for listening. Do you want adjustments to be made only for papers in future issues?
  • edited January 23, 2022
    Lets take this off-forum. (My address is on the SafetyLit website. I listed it here for 60 hours but, after no contact, I removed it to minimize exposure.)
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