Blog post

Our Data Quality Fall 2024 Campaign has officially begun!

Join our Data Quality Challenge - Let’s take action together

26 September 2024 by Yvonne Campfens, Executive Director OA Switchboard

For all stakeholders in the research ecosystem, poor metadata poses significant risks and knock-on effects to research integrity, discoverability, and operational excellence.

Good quality metadata empowers stakeholders, and based on our core values of Trust, Collaboration, and Efficiency we launched the Data Quality Challenge last year, to call on the community to revolutionise publication (meta)data management.

Since then we have been in active discussions with publishers, librarians, consortia, research funders, and others in the wider community and it is clear that everybody understands the crucial role metadata plays in ensuring research is discovered, read, and cited. However, the wider impact of inaccurate and incomplete metadata is often underestimated.

Let us be clear - poor and lacking metadata affects us all: publishers, funders, consortia, libraries, researchers, and the broader academic community. So, let’s take action together!

Earlier this year we developed a video animation with Crossref, ORCID, ROR and others, to demonstrate how we can all take action. The message is clear: all the components needed to make positive changes already exist; it’s about making them work together properly, and everybody has a part to play.

The focus of our current campaign is specifically on publishers, for whom high-quality metadata are the building blocks of any commercial arrangement and business modeling. The consequences of not addressing metadata issues are significant: alongside the well-documented impact on discovery, usage, and impact, publishing values will be undermined, reputations damaged, and business opportunities jeopardized. In summary, the risks of poor metadata practices are:

(in alphabetical order)

Harder contract negotiations and customer dissatisfaction
Loss of control in the open data ecosystem
Misattribution of scholarly work
Non-compliance with industry standards
Operational burden and higher cost
Reduced discoverability, usage, impact, and submissions

For more insights, visit our Data Quality Challenge webpage.

Now the good news…

We have talked about the risks, but let's summarise the benefits of investing in improving metadata quality:

Business Insights: Enhanced management information and better opportunities for portfolio management
Customer Insights: Greater insights into your customers and authors
Stakeholder and Customer Support: Improved services for research funders, institutions, and consortia
System Integration: Full integration into the scholarly communications ecosystem, resulting in greater potential impact
Research Integrity: Support for upstream editorial and research integrity objectives and thus better support for your authors
Discoverability: Enhanced visibility to improve readership and citation

So what next?

As part of our Data Quality Challenge Fall campaign, we will reach out to all OA Switchboard publishers to review and discuss the findings from the data deep-dives held earlier this year. Our goal is to build a shared understanding of the issues and to make a realistic plan for improvements.

We have also provided information to OA Switchboard institutions and consortia to help guide their discussions with publishers. This will enable them to highlight the importance of metadata during negotiations and other meetings.

Our Data Quality Fall Campaign has officially begun! Join us and commit to improving metadata quality for all.

For more information, please contact:

Yvonne Campfens, Executive Director OA Switchboard

yvonne.campfens@oaswitchboard.org

About us:

The OA Switchboard is a mission-driven, community led initiative designed to simplify the sharing of information between stakeholders about open access publications throughout the whole publication journey. It provides a standardised messaging protocol and shared infrastructure that is designed to operate and integrate with all stakeholder systems. It is built by and for the people who use it, and is leveraged with existing PID’s.