Introduction

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is the world's largest technical membership association with over 422,000 members in more than 160 countries. It publishes approximately 200 IEEE transactions, journals and magazines in the fields of electrical engineering and computing, over 25,000 volumes of conference proceedings with papers presented at over 4,000 IEEE conferences globally, including over 1,400 annual conferences, over 5,000 technical standards, and over 400 educational courses. IEEE hosts its publications and content from several publisher partners in its IEEE Xplore platform, containing 4-5 million full-text records.

End-users of IEEE content come to the IEEE Xplore platform through multiple channels of discovery, such as direct visits to the platform, general search engines (e.g. Baidu, Bing, Google), academic search engines (e.g. Baidu Xueshu, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic), library discovery services (e.g. EBSCO Discovery Service, Encore, Primo, Summon, WorldCat Local, WorldCat Discovery), abstract and indexing databases (e.g. Inspec, Scopus, Web of Science), subject repositories (e.g. arXiv, Medline), institutional repositories, e-mail alerts, social media, professional networks and more.

For several years IEEE received inquiries from end-users and library customers regarding content discovery and access from library discovery services. The issues can be broken down into five major categories:

• Discoverability: users cannot find in library discovery services certain IEEE content to which their libraries subscribe.

• Visibility: IEEE content sometimes does not show up in the first few pages of the search results.

• Linking: for some IEEE content, full-text links are missing, break or do not resolve to the correct articles.

• Access: off-campus users sometimes experience authentication problems when they go from library discovery services, abstracting and indexing databases or other search engines to access full-text content in the IEEE Xplore platform.

• Analytics: libraries are not sure how many visits and usages can be attributed to library discovery services and abstracting and indexing databases and whether these investments provide sufficient return on investment.

IEEE strategies for content discovery and access

To facilitate users coming from multiple discovery-to-access pathways, IEEE has developed several strategies:

• Make IEEE Xplore the only platform for accessing IEEE full-text content.

• Collaborate with search engines and abstracting and indexing database partners to disseminate metadata.