Abstract
Many scientific articles are related to specific regions of the Earth. The connection is often implicit, although geospatial metadata has been shown to have positive effects, such as detecting biases in research coverage or enhancing discovery of research. Scholarly communication platforms lack an explicit modelling of geospatial metadata. In this work, we report a novel approach to integrate well-defined geospatial metadata into Open Journal Systems (OJS). Authors create complex geometries to represent the related location(s) or region(s) for their submission and define the relevant time period. They are assisted by an interactive map and a gazetteer to capture high quality coordinates as well as a matching textual description with high usability. The geospatial metadata is published within the article pages using semantic tags, integrated in standardised publication metadata, and shown on maps. Thereby, the geoOJS plugin facilitates indexing by search engines, can improve accessibility, and provides a foundation for more powerful map-based discovery of research articles across journals.
 See the Extended Abstract PDF for more details.
Highlights
Almost every scientific article that refers to existing regions of the earth, contains ”[...] a narrative description of the study area” (Karl, 2019)
We report on a novel approach to integrate well-defined geospatial metadata in a scholarly publishing platform to enhance discovery of scientific articles
With the implementation of geoOJS all but two of the requirements regarding the potential of integrating geospatial metadata in scholarly publishing were met
Summary
Almost every scientific article that refers to existing regions of the earth, contains ”[...] a narrative description of the study area” (Karl, 2019). In more than half of the scientific articles that refer to locations, coordinates are used to determine the location (Karl, Herrick, et al, 2013; Shapiro & Báldi, 2012). Coordinates can be included in articles in different formats (Karl, 2019; Kmoch, Uuemaa, Klug, & Cameron, 2018) and are prone to errors such as improper formatting, incompleteness, and ambiguity (Karl, 2019; Margulies et al, 2016), so that the demand for standardization increases (Karl, 2019; Karl, Herrick, et al, 2013; Kmoch et al, 2018; Margulies et al, 2016; Young & Lutters, 2017)
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