Data Quality Fall Campaign 2024 - The importance of accurate and complete metadata
Metadata is the backbone of research integrity, discoverability, and operational excellence, and poor-quality metadata risks undermining publishing values and reputation, business opportunities and being part of the ecosystem, leading to
(in alphabetical order):
Poor Metadata Consequence
Harder Contract Negotiations and Customer Dissatisfaction
Risk to publisher
Discussion point
Poor metadata affects publishers’ control over essential business processes and objectives
Contract compliance: Research funders, libraries and consortia depend on accurate and complete metadata and reporting in order to manage trigger-events, check compliance with licensing agreements and to fulfill their own reporting obligations (internally, or externally to research councils, research funders, etc). Poor metadata can be regarded as breach of contractual obligations.
Contract negotiations: Consortia, institutions and research funders need good quality metadata and reporting to be able to report back on the impact of their research (investments). If metadata is poor, it makes contract negotiations tougher, longer and more expensive, and there is a risk of non-renewal.
Loss of Control
Poor or lacking metadata badly serve as critical signifiers in automated tools
Staying in control: In a world moving to open data and automatic monitoring and analyses for negotiations, decision-making, trigger-events, trend analysis, (contract) compliance, research integrity and more, you lose control of essential business processes and open signifiers if your metadata is not robust (e.g. Unpaywall). For your publications to be valued on their merits, you need to be in control of your own metadata, as they are critical signifiers in automated tools that openly score and report.
Misattribution
Incorrect attribution of scholarly work due to metadata errors impacts research integrity and ultimately citations
Credibility/Research Integrity: Incorrect attribution of work, affects the credibility of your publications and potentially harms the reputation of the journal and its authors. Accurate metadata foster trust and support research integrity.
Inaccurate and missed citations: Poor metadata can lead to inaccurate or even missing citations which undermines the journal, authors and scholarly communications as a whole.
Non-Compliance with Industry Standards
Failure to meet metadata standards (or best practices) can result in non-compliance with industry requirements leading to exclusion from the ecosystem
Exclusion from the ecosystem: Ultimately a publisher will not be regarded as part of the ecosystem if they don’t provide state-of-the-art metadata (e.g. into Crossref Labs)*. Non-compliance may also preclude your inclusion into indexing services. It can also disadvantage your customers, as they may struggle to import your data into their systems.
Operational Burden and Higher Cost
Inadequate metadata increases the need for manual corrections downstream, increasing your cost
Operational inefficiencies: Poor metadata requires significant downstream (and often manual) corrections, leading to increased administrative and technical workload and operational inefficiencies which have financial implications for the publisher and frustrate operational staff. In short, poor metadata costs money.
Reduced Discoverability, Usage, Impact, and Submissions
Inaccurate or incomplete metadata reduces content visibility and growth potential
Limits discoverability, access and impact: Accurate metadata ensures your content is correctly indexed, appears prominently in search results and ensures all those interested can find and cite your work. Poor quality or incomplete metadata diminishes the discoverability of your content, reducing its reach and impact.
Decreased usage and asset value: When resources are not easily discoverable, their usage drops, leading to questions about the value of a journal, which could impact future (OA) deal opportunities.
Decreased submissions: Authors need their work to be found and used by their peers and the wider community. Reduced discoverability means fewer readers, fewer citations, less impact - and dissatisfied authors. If discoverability and access are limited by poor metadata, authors will seek to publish elsewhere.