Widening the Search-ability of a Journal's Articles

Question

I manage a peer-reviewed and open-access publishing journal for academic research. At the moment, the articles are not viewable in google searches. If someone wants to access the articles, they must go to the journal website and download the article from there. This means that someone must know of the article and our journal to access the piece of research.

I am interested in making the articles that are in our journal appear in google search results and generally more accessible to a wider interested audience. What is a good way to do this?

I have looked into Google Scholar, but it seems you can only upload your own research articles (i.e., that it's only for individual researchers, and not for organisations like an open-access publishing company).

I would appreciate any advice on how to widen the visibility of a publishing company's research articles.

Answer 1

Google scholar

You can find the general indexing policy of Google scholar here: https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/publishers.html#policies

And the more technical information is available here: https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html

In case of link rot, the articles should be findable via search keywords such as "google scholar indexing".

The non-technical summary is that the abstract or the first page of the articles should be vievable for everyone. Further, I think the article should look like scientific articles, with titles, possibly abstracts, text, references, and so on. The exact parameters are almost certainly unknown. I know at least one journal published as a blog, and it is not indexed by Scholar, while some websites are.

General visibility

Publish good articles, get famous editors, perhaps appear in conferences or sponsor them, if relevant for your field. Avoid being a predatory publisher or looking like one.

Maybe also look into the basics of search engine optimization (not the arcane stuff about how to cheat Google, but the basics like having metadata and website headers right) and usability of websites.

Answer 2

Good luck, it's not easy. If you're a member of the editorial board, the good news is the publisher will be doing most of the legwork. Inform them of any opportunities you might encounter, e.g. any potentially-interesting conferences, names to add to the mailing list, etc, and they should take care of the rest (if they don't, find a publisher with a bigger marketing budget).

If you're the publisher then you'll have to do it yourself. Your most pressing concern is to get your journal indexed in all the major databases. Tommi Brander's answer has covered Google Scholar, which is the easiest to set up (since they index for completeness but not really quality). After that there're a lot of others, e.g.

• Medline (if your journal is in the biological sciences)
• PubMed Central
• Scopus
• Astrophysics Data System (if your journal is in astronomy)
• ...
• And the big one, the one that's more important than all other databases: Web of Science.

Getting indexed is not trivial and you'll need to do things like publish regularly (all issues should be on time), publish papers that are cited by papers already in the database, and so on. You'll need a steady stream of papers; preferably 2+ years. You'll need sample papers, an ISSN, yada yada blah blah. As I said, good luck, it's not easy.

Answer 3

converting my comment to an answer, as suggested.

I am interested in making the articles that are in our journal appear in google search results

This is basic thing to be fixed first, before even thinking of indexing. Even if I keep a pdf on my personal website, it appears on google search results. This can be fixed easily by talking to your journal website administrator.

The rest of the question I think, is covered by other answers.