Consonance provides numerous tools to enable you to deliver against the challenges presented by being a publisher inside an academic institution.
University Press
“Consonance is leaps and bounds ahead of its competitors and consistently impresses with its ability to adapt to needs”
Jennie Collinson
Liverpool University Press
University Press
“I needed to report on reviews received and also added to our metadata in a defined period for the board report I regularly produce. We used to do this manually, which was painful. Being able to pull these out of the system saved time. Yay!”
Alison Fox, on LinkedIn
UCL Press, pioneers of Open Access
Awareness of the pressures on university presses
- Your staff members often wear multiple hats. Our unique "All Access Pass" pricing model means you don't have to pay for multiple pricey modules just so one person can see their production data.
- You use multiple tools, not just Consonance, and we make sure we are a good citizen of your overall systems landscape, by having standardised import and export capabilities to ensure data flows between your systems. Even when you have old, problematic systems, we can often flex around them, both on implementation and on an ongoing basis. Contact us to discuss your current systems predicament and budgetary constraint: we have probably seen worse.
- Integrations with various systems. Here is a non-exhaustive list of standard integrations to give a flavour of our out-of-the-box reach: Akstem,
Atypon,
Audible,
Baker & Taylor,
Barnes & Noble,
Bertrams,
Bibliographic Data Services,
Boekenbank,
Booknet Canada,
Bookswarm,
Bookwire,
British Library,
Cambridge Core,
Casalini,
Casemate UK,
CCC,
CEPIEC
Chegg,
Cibtc,
Ciel,
Clarivate,
Clockss,
CNPIEC,
DawsonEra,
Edelweiss,
Faber,
Findaway,
Flipkart,
Footprint,
Gardners,
Glassboxx,
Hachette Distribution,
Harpercollins AU,
Independent Publishers Group,
Jellybooks,
Jstor,
Kobo,
Library Of Congress,
Longleaf,
Macmillan Distribution,
Midwest,
Oapen,
OCLC,
PGW,
Project Muse,
Proquest,
Publishers Licensing Society,
Rnib,
Scopus,
Scribd,
Shulph,
Simon Schuster,
Supadu,
Title Page,
Ulverscroft,
United Library Services,
Vitalsource,
Wiley.
- You need to be able to share progress with your institution. Consonance's multi-faceted reporting means you can gather metrics with ease.
Metadata structuring
Our emphasis on the correct bibliographic modelling of works and products allows clients to produce a wide variety of products for a single work, without the need to re-type metadata, without any brittle "synchronisation", and while maintaining logical links that are used throughout the interface and expressed in ONIX, API feeds, and spreadsheet exports.
Consonance's metadata management is strongly oriented towards the management of works and the associations between them – essential for correctly storing and managing intellectual property.
Each work represents a unique edition and year of annual where relevant, and links successive editions logically – in some cases automatically on creation – to automatically identify replaced and replacing products.
We derive works from multiple other works through various derivation types. For instance, publishing abridged translations of three works as a single new work connects them all together, which allows for clear navigation throughout the system.
In Consonance, a work is a container for an arbitrary number of products, with different formats and your own in-house descriptions of each. The works holds the metadata common to all products (e.g. contributors and table of contents). Then you optionally give overrides for individual products.
And if your series have both print and electronic ISSNs, we automatically associate the correct value with each product.
"Products" encompass chapters, extacts, articles, journals, digital products and licenses, as well as print and digital books, which can be remixed using the derivations feature with that structure communicated, correctly, in ONIX.
Pricing
While traditional trade publishers will often specify consumer RRP pricing in multiple currencies, academic publishers more frequently need to specify pricing for a wider range of customers.
Consonance comes with full support for the wide range of price types and qualifiers available in ONIX, across arbitrary lists of currencies.
It is not unusual for a client to specify combinations such as:
- GBP inc-tax consumer RRP
- GBP inc-tax library RRP
- GBP inc-tax member/subscriber RRP
- USD exc-tax consumer RRP
- USD exc-tax library RRP
- EUR exc-tax consumer RRP
- NZD exc-tax consumer RRP
- AUD exc-tax consumer RRP
- CAD exc-tax consumer RRP
For GBP pricing you choose to specify prices either exc- or inc-tax, and we convert them on export.
For EUR pricing you choose to specify prices either exc-tax, or inc-tax for a chosen national tax regime, and we convert them on export to add or remove taxes for any other Euro area tax regime.
These prices are all available for dissemination through ONIX, spreadsheets, our API, or through XML feeds to catalogue workflows.
We work with you to define which prices you want to specify, and configure your account to make it as straightforward as possible.
Subject schemas
We support the latest BISAC, and Thema subject codes, and keep them up to date so your metadata quality does not decay. We still support BIC, for your legacy needs.
We provide extensive Editeur-supplied guidance on the use of Thema codes, making it easier to work effectively with the new standard by distinguishing between academic and professional codes, and codes intended for general interest.
We also support the Dutch Uniform Subject Classification (NUR) codes, and are able to add further national code systems on request.
Open Access
Support for free and Open Access products comes as part of every Consonance account. We reference all CC licenses, with license details included in ONIX. We support, of course, all the standard identifiers you would expect, such as ISBN-10 and ISBN-13s, ISSNs, DOIs, ISNIs, standard retail SKUs, GTINs, Ringgold, D&B, ORCiD, ISNIs, DOIs and multiple in-house or legacy IDs, to enable you to match your data in other systems.
Contact management
Contacts occupy a central place in the Consonance system. Editors, illustrators, series editors, authors, distributors, reviewers, proof-readers, printers, sales agents: they are all in one place, and contacts can adopt multiple roles. Consonance holds an unlimited number of contributors (and, like our features, we do not charge you more if you have millions of records: our All-access-pass model means you are not financially penalised for having all your data in one place.)
They can be associated with each other, and in particular for academic publishers this is expressed in terms of professional affiliations. All of your authors with an affiliation to an organisation can be linked to it, so they are all listed on the organisations contact page.
If you experience the overlap between authors/editors and reviewers common to the specialised publisher, you'll appreciate being able to associate a single contact in your address book both with the works that they have authored and with the reviews they have written. Configure reviewers so their description on every review automatically includes their professional affiliations, or globally redefined to reflect the authors more recent accomplishments – a notable paper they recently published, for example.
When reviewing information for an author, you are provided with links to all of their co-authors as well.
There is no limit to the number of contributors that can be associated with a work and its products, and some Consonance clients have over 100 contributors listed for single works. There are features to allow you to bulk upload contributor information. We use the full range of ONIX contributor roles.
Support for ISNI and ORCID lets your contributors be unambiguously identified using the latest standards, allowing third-parties to cross-reference to other proprietary identifiers.
Tag contacts by any kind of interest or grouping you want, using free text that you use to build your own informal, internal taxonomies, to enhance the formal groupings already provided through affiliations, subject coding, geographical tags, relationships, contributions and more. Use these tags in the reporting tools, to target marketing efforts, then track your activities using tracked copies, issue management, discussions and other insight tools. Analyses such as "seasons" enable you to take a thousand-foot view on your upcoming plans and isolate and improve any data quality issues in good time.
Share copies and reading samples
- Peer review tracking can be done in the same way as tracking review copies.
- All your organisational contacts can be managed within Consonance, not just contributors to works. Note who has received copies, then track their response. They are findable alongside works they have contributed to, copies they have received and their collaborators and co-contributors and institutions.
Secure permissions
- Record your right to include extracts, quotes, and other content from other publishers and rights holders.
- Manage the licensing of your own rights to other publishers, to maximise the reach of your IP.
