Publisher Support for EBSCO Discovery Service

EBSCO recognizes the importance of being able to accurately determine the source of user traffic. When users link directly from origin to destination, it is easy to see what site is sending traffic your way. However, when users link from origin through another site and then on to the destination, it becomes more difficult to capture the details needed to ascertain where the user started. 

Consider that there are many flights available from LA to Boston, some of which go direct and others that stop in Denver, Chicago, and Philadelphia. All flights will get you to your destination, but those flights with layovers present a challenge for the person who has to pick you up at the airport, because those flight will show you coming from Chicago and not LA. The same is true for publishers attempting to trace the ultimate origin of their site’s incoming traffic.

Link resolvers such as Full Text Finder (EBSCO), SFX (Ex Libris), and 360 Link (Serial Solutions) often act as intermediaries in connecting discovery services to sites containing the full text, and the fact that link resolvers and discovery services may be available from the same companies but not necessarily used in concert by libraries causes further confusion. For example, if a library subscribes to EBSCO Discovery Service and uses SFX for their linking, publishers may attribute incoming traffic erroneously to Ex Libris.

EBSCO has developed a fact sheet to help familiarize publishers with the topic and the aspects involved in identifying user origin. In addition, EBSCO has initiated a conversation with NISO with the goal of forming industry-wide recommendations for tracking incoming traffic. See the fact sheet in the Quick Links section on this page labeled EDS Origin Identifier Fact Sheet for more information.

Please contact our Databases Publisher Content Management group at EISPCMdatabases@ebsco.com. One of our PCM Database Specialists will investigate your inquiry and reach out with more information.

• FTP is our preferred method for data delivery. We will set you up with an FTP account on our host site so that you can upload full data as well as any updates or additions. 
• If FTP on our server is not an option for you, we can pull data from a preexisting FTP hosted elsewhere.
• We can also harvest data that is OAI-PMH compliant, or use a download link.

We accept the following formats for metadata:

• XML (preferred format)
• MARC 
• JSON

It may be possible to accept other data formats such as MODS or Dublin Core. Please contact our Databases Publisher Content Management Group at EISPCMdatabases@ebsco.com with questions.

For full text, we accept the following formats:

• PDF (preferred format)
• Full text XML 

At this time, we cannot accept any Excel files (.csv or .xls), image files, or EPUBs.

Yes, as of 2013, all full text contracts automatically feature inclusion on EDS. If you signed your full text contract prior to 2013, contact our content management team through this web form to indicate that you would like to expand your journal(s) or ebooks to be included on EDS.

There are currently more than 500 databases included in EDS.

We need your full text in order to make it searchable by keywords. We do not display this full text. It is only used internally to ensure your content will be as discoverable as possible by leveraging keywords in the full text to contribute to our relevancy ranking search algorithm.

We only accept digitized content for use in EDS. 

EBSCO’s EDS Partner Database questionnaire asks for information on your database content formats, elements, and delivery methods available for sending electronic data to EBSCO for inclusion in EDS. 

The EDS Partner Database questionnaire may be found here.

The EBSCOpost blog explores many different aspects of EDS, including new releases, tips for getting the most out of EDS, featured apps, and customer testimonials. 

EDS helps increase usage and value of content. 

There’s no set syntax that works with all content and for all publishers, but here are some general guidelines:

Direct links that go from EDS to the same record on your platform are ideal. Links that rely on going to your site and running a search are not.

• DOI can be a very reliable method for linking, but should not be used alone since not all metadata records matching the publication may contain a DOI. See “Link Flexibility” for more information.
• Likewise, persistent or durable URLs are the most accurate but should not be used alone. See “Link Flexibility” for more information.
• Article/chapter-level linking is ideal, but if not available, journal/book-level linking may be acceptable.
• Many sites now accept OpenURL, which uses standard article metadata in order to connect to and from different locations. See some of the more common elements used in OpenURL in our EDS Publisher Linking Recommendations

CustomLinks are an EBSCO feature that dynamically creates links from an EDS search result to related information on another web site. CustomLinks allow the library to provide seamless integration of the user’s EDS session with the library’s online subscriptions, link resolver, or other web-based services.

CustomLinks use specific metadata in the EDS record, such as author, journal name, ISSN, or title, to construct the link. The accuracy of the link will depend on the quality of the record’s metadata and your platform’s ability to accept the link.

For more information about CustomLinks, please view our EDS Publisher Linking Recommendations.