Online. Indexed. Catalogued. Free. But will users find it?

‘If it isn’t online, it doesn’t exist’ seems to be the accepted wisdom in scholarly publishing today. We could debate the validity of this statement; instead, let us agree on a related point: even when it is online, it still does not exist for various users. Most publishers make some effort to address this: engaging with the ready-made audiences of hosting services, full-text aggregators and subscription agent gateways; distributing metadata to subject-specific indexing databases; allowing search engines and document delivery providers to index full-text content; sharing holdings information with libraries and developers of eresource management tools. But even the sum of all these efforts is inadequate as a solution. Problems remain: poor-quality data, infrequent transfer, anomalies between providers, content vagaries (and how one machine can describe them to another), the increasingly customized nature of individual customer packages, the proliferation of open access content, and more. These ongoing issues mean that you can put your content online, you can open up its metadata and you can even make the full text free – but you cannot be sure that it is going to be found and read by your target audience. The development of sophisticated technologies (such as the OpenURL, a standard for linking users to content licensed by their institution) and tools (link resolvers, web-scale discovery indexes) has addressed some of the fundamental problems with online content discovery, but we now need to fine-tune these early solutions to address more granular or newly emerging problems.