bluesyemre

It’s readily apparent that metadata is an essential part of scholarly publishing. So why do we let so much of this treasured commodity slip through our fingers over the course of the publication process?

Each portion of the publication lifecycle requires important metadata, but not all of this information is carried all the way through the workflow. Instead, much of it remains in the isolated silos in which it’s collected. Inera’s CEO Bruce Rosenblum notes, “There’s just form after form after form of metadata collected [in submission systems] and it’s amazing how little of that makes it through to the final XML or beyond.”

For example, did you know that ORCID IDs (i.e. author IDs) often don’t make it out of the submission system? And that when publishers produce XML from manuscripts, Ringgold IDs collected at submission for author affiliations are often lost, effectively expunging hugely important data from publisher records?

But the lack of synchronization across publication phases—and the subsequent loss of this important metadata—persists. Ringgold’s North American Sales Director, Christine Orr, comments, “It negatively impacts all kinds of things downstream, and results in a lack of discoverability, lack of inoperability between other systems, and the inability to really, truly analyze your author base.” And it makes the publication workflow rife with inaccuracies. Bruce Rosenblum notes, “If it’s not automatically integrated into the workflow, then it’s a much more manual process, and hence a potentially inaccurate process.”

This information matters to both publishers and funders. Having unbridled access to the complete set of metadata collected throughout the publication lifecycle would mean infinitely better information about not only authors but also grant appropriation. It would enable better business analysis by publishers and funders alike, and would help allstakeholders identify trends in areas like open access, measure the impact of funding and make more informed decisions. Rosenblum notes, “Publishers need to understand there’s a huge value in integrated metadata. And by integrated, I mean that its shareable acrosssystems.”

http://www.copyright.com/blog/handle-with-care-metadata-in-scholarly-publishing/