A couple of colleagues and I were thinking about publishing a book in engineering. I have heard repeatedly that people who go with a traditional publisher don't get any royalties, they transfer the copyrights, and on top of that, the book ends up being sold for a lot of money (which is something we're against as people from developing countries don't have access to them). Thus, after a short discussion we all agreed that going through the traditional means is no longer necessary. We're all skilled in LaTeX so we don't need the services that publishers usually provide for formatting the book. As a matter of fact, we're not planning on making any profit either, so we're very excited about the opportunity to provide the book as an open electronic document.
The main question we have is how do we make sure that people can cite our book and that we have a way to count the citations?
Answer
Judging from the things you have said in comments, it seems you may believe that
- either a DOI and/or ISBN is required in order for services like Google Scholar, Scopus, or Web of Science to list a document and count citations for it, and
- that your document only needs to have the "right" identifier for these services to "count" it.
Neither of those is true. Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science each have specific inclusion criteria that determine whether it will index a document. The inclusion criteria do not care what kind of identifier (DOI or ISBN) the document has. Rather,
- Google Scholar is not selective: if a PDF document has a title, a list of authors, and a bibliography section, it may be indexed.
- Scopus and Web of Science are selective: they only include documents that have been specifically chosen for inclusion (or, that have been published in a serial, like a journal, conference, or book series, that has been specifically selected for inclusion.)
If a document is indexed by one of these services, citations of that document in other indexed documents will be counted, even if the citations don't include a DOI or ISBN. Each of these services has an internal record identifier for every document it indexes, and counts a citation when it encounters a reference with the same title, authors, date and other publication information (e.g. journal name and issue, or book publisher.) They do not rely on DOI or ISBN to identify a document for purposes of counting citations; many citation styles don't include DOI or ISBN.
In particular, here is more information about inclusion criteria for each of those three:
- A document will be indexed by Google Scholar if you make it available online and make it "look" like a scholarly document following these criteria, and citations of your ebook in other documents indexed by Google Scholar will be counted in Scholar's citation count even if it has no ISBN or DOI. (See e.g. all the arXiv documents that are indexed by Google Scholar, with "citation counting".)
- A document will be indexed by Scopus if it is published in one of the journals, conference proceedings, or book series included in Scopus. In particular, here are the criteria by which they select books to include:
Book selection is via a publisher-based approach (no individual book suggestions are considered). As the selection is evaluated on a per book basis, the Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB) is not involved in the evaluation of this content type. A dedicated group of highly educated individuals are responsible for the publisher selection process. All books from selected publishers deemed "in scope" will be selected for coverage. Priority and selection of book list from a specific publisher depends on:
- Reputation and impact of the publisher
- Size and subject area of the books list
- Availability and format of the book content
- Publication policy and editorial mission
- Quality of published book content
As with journals, a peer review process is also associated with scholarly books, and Thomson Reuters relies on the integrity of the publisher to insure that book content is valid and original.
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