​​Institutions: The risks of poor metadata
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For institutions, high quality metadata are critical to connect to your research.
The consequences of not addressing metadata issues are significant.
In summary the risks of poor metadata practices are (in alphabetical order):
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Misattribution of scholarly work
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Harder contract negotiations
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Loss of control in the open data ecosystem
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Operational burden and higher cost
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Reduced discoverability, usage, and impact
The benefits of getting it right
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We have talked about the risks, but now the good news for institutions of investing in improving metadata quality:
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System Integration: Full integration into the scholarly communications ecosystem, resulting in greater potential impact
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Research Integrity: Support for upstream editorial and research integrity objectives and thus better support for your authors
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Discoverability: Enhanced visibility to improve readership and citation
Best Practices
Accurate and efficient “each stage: first time right”
The Data Quality Challenge invites you to lead the change
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​Below, we're gathering approaches and real-life examples of institutions putting this into practice. Use these best practices as inspiration for your own approach. ​Get inspired!
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Key elements:
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Making sure your organisation has a ROR id.
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Ensuring your ROR record is as complete as possible, including country information, abbreviations and acronyms, local-language naming conventions (i.e. the official name in the institution’s own language), and corresponding English or other international names.
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Encouraging your researchers to have a single ORCID and use it when applying for a grant or submitting to a journal for publication.
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Updating/adding to your researchers' ORCID records with 'ascerted affiliations'.
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Treating this as a continuous improvement process, keeping pace with emerging standards as the industry evolves - for example, by using the OA Switchboard “not-for-me” button to support its learning mechanism.
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Highlight the importance of metadata during negotiations and other meetings with publishers. Information to guide these discussions is here.
Join the collaborative effort and achieve change
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Be part of the solution to improve data quality and completeness
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Be part of the future for collaborative, cross industry progress
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Support the call to action by communicating to publishers the problems experienced by inaccurate and non-standardised data
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Promote OA Switchboard to publishers and tell them about the Data Quality Challenge
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Encourage your publishers to collaborate by explaining how improved data also benefits themselves
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