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:
Peer Review:
Publishing Formats:
Access, Dissemination and Impact:
FUP Scientific Cloud for Books in Numbers
Published by FUP
CC BY 4.0
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36253/fup_best_practice.2