HIRMEOS: Enhancing open access monographs in the digital research ecosystem

The HIRMEOS project (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science Infrastructure), focused on the implementation of technical workflows for the effective dissemination of monographs within the digital research ecosystem. The National Documentation Centre (EKT) participated in the European project HIRMEOS with Open Book Press, an online platform for the publication of Open Access monographs in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

The objective of HIRMEOS, which concluded in June 2019, was to highlight the importance of monographs as scientific communication medium and enrich five major electronic publishing infrastructures (OpenEdition Books, OAPEN Library, EKT Open Book Press, Ubiquity Press and Göttingen University Press) with additional functionalities and features, with a scope to develop value added services and facilitate their future integration into the European Science Open Cloud.

HIRMEOS applied digital technologies and standards widely used by online publishers, into the five platforms. More specifically, it developed tools and designed processes that allow the assignment of unique identifiers for content (DOI) and authors (ORCID), enhance the interoperability of digital publications, and automatically validate published content via the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). Additional functionalities were also introduced for the extraction of usage metrics, content annotation and entity identification.

HIRMEOS contributed significantly to the implementation of advanced tools for researchers and publishers, and further strengthened the dissemination of Open Access monographs. Upon completion of the project, the five platforms were aligned into an interoperable digital publishing framework that enables their future integration into overlying content aggregation and indexing infrastructures.

The project results were presented in a dedicated workshop at the ELPUB2019 conference. The workshop was open to all participants and attracted researchers, infrastructure providers, publishers and other stakeholders interested in the scope and implementations of the project. The prospects for future use and improvements were also discussed during the workshop.

Open Book Press is an EKT service and  enables prestigious scientific publishers to have their own online publishing house monographs. The service is designed for reputable publishers, non-profit organisations (universities, research institutes, scientific societies and memory media) that invest in 'Knowledge Economy', the dynamics of electronic publishing and Open Access.

The co-ordinator of the HIRMEOS project was the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the partners were the National Documentation Centre (EKT), OAPEN, DGIA, Gottingen University, Ubiquity Press, Open Book Pub, DARIAH ERIC and Torino University.